It is the sort of prediction that was made decades ago, when awareness of the environmental cost of humanity’s burgeoning paper consumption was coming to the fore. For ages environmentally conscious visionaries have foretold of the end of paper as the predominant means of storing and illustrating information. They predicted that its use would petter out in the none-too-distant future and yet today each month brings desolation to yet another wooded area in the effort to keep up to present demand for the stuff.

Business entities, marketing firms and government departments all plough through countless tonnes of paper upon which they print their advertising, invoicing, communications and ever more documents with a shelf-life measured in weeks, days, hours and even minutes, academics leave no stone unturned as they decimate pads of paper in the name of recording their notes and even friends and lovers wrap their gift parcels in decorated paper. We cannot get enough paper to solidly satisfy our demands.

However were the visionaries really so mistaken in their predictions? At face value it may seem to be so but while paper demand increased there were a lot of other variables that changed significantly. Technology has come a long way since the time of mechanical typewriters and the original light bulb. Entire revolutions in communications and information systems have taken place in the last couple of centuries, including the radio, telegrams, the telephone, the television, the computer, the internet, mobile phone networks and many many more. Each invention served to change the way that we perceive distance, scale and the storage and conveyance of information.

What several decades ago used to be stored upon volumes of paper is now stored upon a microchip or a segment of magnetic medium within a hard-drive. Without doubt the volume of virtual stored information far exceeds all the written material in the World and is stored much more efficiently. The advent of electronic mail systems and short messaging systems over the internet and mobile phones has greatly reduced dependency on the postal system.

Therefore the situation is not that we have failed to reduce the proportion to which we depend upon the paper medium, although a lot more could be done, but the sheer volume of demand has increased, far outstripping the progress made, making the world ever more hungry for paper.

This being the case, it is possible that a total independence of paper documentation may be over a half-century away and so we today must think of ways to not only mitigate the impact of our dependency in terms of logging and waste, but also look ahead for the technologies that will bridge the gap between the present dependence and future independence.

There do exist plenty of uses for paper, aside from within its role as writing material, but even within this role used paper can be recycled a certain number of times. Non-recycled paper consists of relatively long fibres that provides the material with strength without sacrificing flexibility. Since the recycling process tends to break down these fibres into shorter ones the recycled product is of a lower quality and can be more brittle if untreated. Therefore it is not feasible to expect to recycle the material indefinitely.

On the other hand information technology may have come a long way but it has not come so far as to guarantee the eternal retrievability and integrity of information stored upon existing mediums. Optical disks wear down over time and use, magnetic and electronic mediums lose their charge. This is why there are many places in the world where paper is still used for official documentation purposes. Laptop technologies also have a long way to go. They need to grow lighter and more affordable, easier on the eyes and more reliable. Perhaps we shall even need to go beyond the concept of a laptop towards more futuristic concepts in interfacing and interaction. Such may be the stuff of science fiction but perhaps humanity is too distracted by other more immediate concerns to try hard enough.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Environmental. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.