How much paper does a person use on average in a year?

WHATEVER happened to the “paperless office”? Thirty years ago the rise of computers was hailed as the beginning of the paperless-office era. In a 1980 briefing in The Economist entitled “Towards the paperless office”, we recommended that businesses trying to improve productivity should “reduce the flow of paper, ultimately aiming to abolish it”. Since then, alas, global paper consumption has increased by half. The average American uses the paper equivalent of almost six 40-foot (12-metre) trees a year. In Belgium paper consumption is pushed up by the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, which must produce its documentation in an array of different languages. The chart shows apparent paper consumption (production plus imports minus exports), which can distort results as it includes paper exported as other products. Finland, for instance, produces a lot of paper and converts it into packaging domestically, exaggerating its paper usage. The same is true for Austria, Sweden and Germany.