Does the Internet Produce More Printing?

Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, made an interesting observation today in the Wall Street Journal's special pull out section on ECO-nomics (ecofriendly economics--get it?).

The observation, which came up in the de riguer questioning as to why, after all these years of talking about a paperless world, the world still has so much paper, was this:

"The reality is that paper has grown consistently over the past three decades. Once of the biggest sources of apper growth really is the Internet. It's the printing of email."

We are accustomed to thinking that the Internet is a boon to the environmental movement. But Mulcahy's observation, along with some knowledge of how much energy Google's server farms eat up per day, puts this belief into serious doubt.

It puts into doubt, too, the average office worker's desire to print out that important email. However, without adequate other options to isolate and keep important digitized information, printing out that email and throwing it in a manilla folder is the default, dead trees be damned.

Document imaging technology can help solve such problems--but not without solving the problem of how the average office worker's needs can be balanced with environmental concerns.