Imagine a World Without Paper

Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers

Now that there's hardly a business or office in the world without a computer we're meant to be in the age of the paperless office.

We were told this would be good for the environment because we would no longer need to cut down huge swathes of forest every year. We would no longer need massive amounts of storage space and archive material.

It hasn't - so far - yet turned out like that and, if you think about it, how realistic is it? Paper has been in existence for approximately 2000 years. The word comes from the Egyptian - Papyrus - which wasn't actually paper at all. Papyrus was formed from beaten strips of the papyrus plant. These strips were then layered in right angles to form a kind of mat, pounded into a thin sheet and left in the sun to dry.

The resulting sheets were ideal for writing on. Since they were also lightweight and portable they became the writing medium of choice of Egyptians, Greeks and Romans for record keeping, spiritual texts and works of art.

But paper as we understand it was invented in China in the second century AD by a eunuch of the Han Dynasty called T'sai Lun.

He experimented to refine the process of sofening and steeping the plant fiber until each filament was completely separate.

Water was mixed with the individual fibres in a large vat. Next, a screen was submerged in the vat and lifted up through the water, catching the fibres on its surface. When dried, this thin layer of intertwined fibre became paper.

As societies developed and became more complicated so did the need to record important events, document transactions, agreements and property rights. Papermaking spread slowly throughout Asia to Nepal and later to India. The origins of early maths and medical knowledge were India and the Islamic world, and the information was recorded so that the now-transportable knowledge could spread wewstwards across the world.

In the West records had been kept on parchment (dried animal skins) which were expensive, hand lettered and illustrated, making documents and texts slow, costly to produce or copy and therefore exclusive.

Using paper for mass communication really took hold in the 15th Century, when Johann Gothenburg perfected movable type and printed his famous bible in 1456.

The rest, as they say, is history and in answer to those with environmental concerns:

The main source of raw material for paper is trees and trees are renewable. Manage forests in the sustainable way that they are in Europe, for example, and for every tree cut down, three to four are replanted in its place.

It's estimated that there are 25% more trees in the developed world today than there were in 1901 and in Europe alone, forests are increasing annually by an area equivalent to more than 1.5 million football pitches and we all know that trees are essential to maintaining the quality of the air we breathe.

And how do you compare the "carbon footprint" of producing and printing on paper with the power used in the zillions of computers, servers and other IT equipment that's switched on every hour of every day?

Today, we take paper for granted. Where would newspapers, authors and artists be without it? Would we derive as much pleasure from seeing a work of art on screen? Or reading a book online?

Equally paper is one essential tool of almost every business you can think about.

Who hasn't had the experience of a computer crashing, an external hard drive or a CD or memory stick disintegrating and the cold feeling of knowing that precious records have been irretrievably lost? There are times when a physical, printed record is still an essential back-up

So all in all it seems we won't be shifting to the paperless society quite yet - and that means we'll need storage space for the foreseeable future.

From Ipswich to Innsbruck, Illinois to India, wherever there's increasing pressure to keep paper records and use costly office space economically, archive storage offsite is a service businesses will continue to need.