But would using less paper really be that important? I mean we can’t possibly use very much paper the way things are now, right? Many are shocked to find out just how much paper we use every day. The average person will use 500 pounds of paper over the course of a year. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad that I still have sheets left from a notebook I bought 10 years ago. 40% of ALL logging worldwide is to produce paper. Every year, the United States dumps 26 MILLION TONS of paper into landfills, and all of that decomposing paper releases methane - which is much worse than carbon dioxide. Simply put, that’s a lot of gosh darned paper. The article itself reinforces the benefits of recycling paper, but this can apply to simply reducing paper usage in the first place as well – if offices weren’t printing tons of paper with more-expensive-than-wine ink into the most expensive storage containers we’ve ever invented, perhaps there would be a lot less paper waste in the first place. 

But what if paperless offices aren’t what we think? Ecological Paradoxes: William Stanley Jevons and the Paperless Office points out the common paradoxes that might arise when paperless offices become a reality. For example, in the past 50 years, the fuel efficiency of the average car has doubled – that is, a car can drive twice as far on the same amount of fuel as it did 50 years ago. One might assume then that the typical driver would only use half as much fuel as they did back then – but instead, the average driver simply decided to drive twice as far instead. Or consider the efficiency of coal. Coal is a dead industry today, but when it was on the rise, increases in the efficiency of coal lead to MORE coal usage, not less. This relates to a paperless office in the same way – rather than simply using less paper, society may decide to instead use more paper now that offices aren’t going to use so much. Employees might print out all their emails, knowing they don’t need the paper for reports any more. Strict oversite of paper usage may become lax. Above all, paperless offices might lead to a price drop in paper, in turn leading to it becoming a more attractive choice elsewhere.
This old paper from 2000 - IS PAPERLESS REALLY MORE? - is an interesting read – and it continues the theme that paperless offices might not be as great as we all think. Yes, it does claim that annotating is unlikely to become as easy on a digital document as a paper document. Hard to believe that 97% of business information was still on paper as recently as 1997. Having said that, a lot of the information in this article is quite true – paper consumption today still increases, and the existence of a better technology does not immediately destroy the old – calculators still exist, despite free phone apps and wolfram alpha being able to perform the same job as good as or even better than one. Some of this is people simply being set in their ways, but there are valid use cases for paper – the main ones being portability and ease of use. After all, even someone who can’t set the clock on a VCR or thinks that turning off the monitor = turning off the computer can still read a piece of paper.
