But wait, paper isn’t needed anymore because we have computers now right? Remember when the geniuses were all saying that we wouldn’t need paper anymore, that we would become a paperless society because of Bill Gates and Microsoft. You know the drill, computers were going to do all that for us. That was the prediction of many a pundit by the early 1990’s. Fast forward for a second, those same tech geniuses are telling us that Artificial Intelligence [A.I] is going to make it where we don’t need human labor anymore. Soon machines will replace humans everywhere! Do you believe it? I decided to re-visit this assumption of more than 30 years ago. Let’s take a look now three decades after the advent of the microcomputer to see how that prediction is going, and what really happened:

Let me ask you, say you have an i-Phone and a laptop and an i-Pad and even a desktop at work, have you stopped wiping your butt or blowing your nose into a Kleenex tissue? 🙂 Probably not right? The world hasn’t either but it turns out that really doesn’t matter in the scheme of things because it doesn’t even touch the surface of paper consumption into these 2020’s. Take a look at the following statistics I found below on all things paper, [using a paperless laptop]:

Preface note: I personally do not own a copier myself, though on occasion I do need something in print. I just use an online office supply for that. It’s not about the environment for me, it’s more about I don’t want another machine to keep up with around here and the ink and the paper and the this and the that – exhausting! I only need something printed out maybe twice a year?

~ “Worldwide consumption of paper has risen by 400% in the last 40 years, with 35% of all harvested trees being used for paper manufacturing. Paper consumption grows by 22% a year, meaning paper costs double every 3.3 years.”

~ “Over 40% of wood pulp goes toward the production of paper. U.S. offices use 12.1 trillion sheets of paper a year.” Wow!

~ ” U.S. paper consumption is over six times greater than the World average and about 25% greater than Japan, the world’s second largest per capita paper consumer.”

~ “Americans now use about 31.5 million tons of printing and writing paper each year, equaling about 660 pounds per person. This requires 535 million trees and 12 billion gallons of oil.”

~ Even after digitization, “the average office worker generates about two pounds worth of paper and paperboard products every day.”

~ U.S. office workers use an average “4 million tons of copy paper annually.” [Damn, maybe I should have sold office supplies instead.] 🙂

By now I bet all of you feel horrible about all this and you should be ashamed of yourself, killing all those trees then leaving your printouts on the copier [like you do] to only later be thrown in a wastepaper basket. You really are awful aren’t you? I knew you were up to no good when you took that office job and now I can’t wait for the environmental zealots to get a hold of you. 🙂 But they’re busy right now trying to write Kamala’s next speech, you know at the customary 3rd grade level [?], and you can bet they’ll place all 20 of those repetitive words down on paper! 🙂

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