New printing papers cause angst at the store
Lee Gomes has an amusing Wall Street Journal column on the plethora of what he calls "yuppie papers" that make choosing a simple white 8.5 x 11 letter size paper for your printer a nightmare that seems to require a MPT or Masters in Paper Types, when all it reqruires is good common sense to go with the paper weight and price you can afford. He also had this interesting statistic on paper consumption that I hadn't heard about:
Everyone knows about those goofball predictions from a generation ago about how computers would make for a "paperless office." For a while, of course, the opposite was happening; think of how many trees gave their lives in the service of PowerPoint presentations. For much of the 1990s, U.S. consumption of office paper was growing at nearly double the rate of the gross national product.
Two years ago, though, those trend lines suddenly reversed -- at about the same time as the Nasdaq bubble burst, as a matter of fact. Since then, office paper consumption has been flat, or even down, says Jaakko Poyry, a forestry research company in Finland.