Texas Cops

It seems as though we’ve been hearing about a paperless society for decades now, and we’re barley any closer that we were when all the hype started. About the only paper we use less these days than we did ten or twenty years ago is paper money. The debit card means we don’t need to carry around stack of cash anymore, but other technologies that were supposed to help reduce our use of paper may have even had the opposite effect.

Even the ATM and cash registers that accept our debit cards in lieu of paper money spit out thermal paper receipts. If you think about the net use of paper over the long term, paper money gets passed back and forth and used hundreds of times in the ultimate recycling effort. Using our debit cards instead of paper money at convenience stores, gas pumps, restaurants, and everywhere else that we use them, results in all those little machines kicking out paper receipts and going through countless thermal paper rolls each day. That’s paper that’s used one and then tossed into the garbage.

Another of the innovations that was supposed to take us into the paperless era was the office email. Instead of writing out memos to be distributed to co-workers, we can now send electronic messages via email from our computer to the entire company. Paperless? Not quite. How many of your coworkers do you see printing out every email they get on a nice brand, new sheet of 8.5 X 11 paper? If your office is anything like the ones in which I’ve worked, it’s a pretty high percentage. So let’s weigh the paper required to print out emails versus the paper memos that were used previously. At first glance, it would seem that since not everybody prints out their emails, it a net reduction. Not so fast.

Before the days of email, it took a serious amount of effort to write up, print out, copy and distribute a paper memo. The result was that memos were reserved for important communications. If you got more than two or three a week, you threw up your hands in exasperation at the wasted time. Today, thanks to the ease with which we can type and send email memos, our office inboxes see at least two or three memos every hour. Even if the percentage of these that gets printed is small, it still outweighs the paper used under the old system.

The more we try to go paperless, it seems, the more paper we use. I haven’t figured out how e-readers like the Kindle will increase our paper usage, but if history holds true, it will.