Facts About Paper
The documentation for a Boeing 747 weighs more than the plane itself.
Despite visions of a paperless office, 80-90% of all information in the average office is still maintained on paper.
Managing paperwork falls in the top ten time-wasting activities of managers.
80% of papers that are filed are never referenced again.
The average office-worker spends 3 hours a week sorting through the paperwork on their desk.
Only 20% of the contents of a typical In-tray require action; of the remainder 40% can be filed and 40% can be tossed.
The information supply available to us doubles every 5 years.
50% of all filed information is duplicated or obsolete.
The earth wastes enough paper every day to cover the netherlands every 5 minutes.
60% of materials going to storage have no retention value and should have been destroyed at the office level.
Workgroups lose 15% of all documents they handle and spend 30% of their time trying to find lost documents. 7.5% of all documents get lost completely.
The global consumption of paper has increased 20 fold over the last century and has tripled in the last 30 years alone.
Printing increases by around 40% when email is introduced into an organisation.
Americans throw out enough paper each year to build a 12-foot high wall from New York to Los Angeles.
The average office worker makes about 61 trips per week to the fax machine, copier and printer.
A four-drawer filing cabinet, when full, holds 18,000 pages.
It costs about $25,000 to fill a four drawer filing cabinet and over $2,100 per year to maintain it - Gartner Group, Coopers & Lybrand, Ernst & Young.
The UK is the worlds 5th largest consumer of paper products. In 2005 the UK consumed 12.5million tonnes of paper, of which 7.6m tonnes were imported.
12.5 million tonnes of paper and cardboard are used annually in the UK.
Recycled paper produces 73% less air pollution than if it was made from raw materials.
The average person in the UK gets through 38kg of newspapers per year.
The United States produced and uses 1/3 of the world's paper. That's over 300 kg per person per year, almost 2.5 times more than the amount of meat they consume in the same period.
The average time to retrieve and re-file a paper document is 10 minutes. An average of 3% of documents are lost or misfiled and have to be recovered at an alarming cost of $120 per document.
Industrialized nations, with 20 percent of the world's population, consume 87 percent of the world's printing and writing papers.
Every year the average british family throws away 6 trees worth of paper
Over 150 billion newspapers are sold across the world every year.
It takes 24 trees to make 1 ton of newspaper.
55% of paper produced across the world still comes from newly felled trees.
Although paper recycling has improved significantly over recent years only 38% of paper is from recycled sources.
The majority of timber used in the production of paper is sourced from forest harvested timber, not from tree plantations.
In 2004 recycled paper and board provided about 74% of the source materials for the 6.2million tonnes of paper manufactured in the UK's 76 paper and board mills. A further 7.7 million tonnes were imported.
Recycled paper made up 75.5% of the raw materials for UK newspapers in 2004.
