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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

That's an impressive achievement. But how many offices use substantial amounts of paper entirely internally any more?

The big problem with paper recycling is that the fibers get shorter on each pass, resulting in weaker paper. Going closed-cycle on paper is going to make that problem worse. It's not like aluminum, where you can go round and round forever without deterioration. Now if the system can take junk mail as a feedstock, it will be more useful.

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Tons of profitable companies still run on a lot of paper. I worked at an insurance company where the head of the most profitable division (earth quake) that actively discouraged the Idea of moving huge insurance contracts to digital. Anecdotal, but I assume this is not unique.

It's a lot harder to do discovery on 100 tons of paper in a vault than on ten tons of disk drives.

I have often thought it would be cynically useful to use a font that makes it hard to OCR text for exactly this reason.

Programs are now better than humans at that, as the CAPTCHA people have discovered the hard way.

Definitely not just anecdotal. I think people on HN might be flabbergasted by how many businesses in industries worth billions still largely operate with paper.

Problem with staying ahead of the curve is that you cannot see how huge the curve is.

Highest margins in the company. Thanks for validating my choice not to buy an earthquake policy.

Worked at a sales department in 2010, my office (or closet) was in front of the main A3 printer. It was running dusk till dawn. Most of the employee despise computers (partially for good reasons: bad IT contracts and not tailored tools and devices => rageprint).

Most of the prints had a lifespan of 1 hours before being thrown out. Mostly scratchpad for too large spreadsheets.

In Japan, paper is still really commonplace in offices and in other institutions (schools, retail, factories etc). A lot of old technologies like fax are still commonplace in Japan so this makes a lot of sense there.

Also a lot of older large corporations in the UK and USA still largely rely on large amounts paper for forms, newsletters etc.

So I still see it being quite useful in a lot of current markets.

> That's an impressive achievement. But how many offices use substantial amounts of paper entirely internally any more?

Just to add to the data points: nearly every large engineering firm, or any utility (power/water/O&G/etc.) with an engineering capability. Most drawings are still printed for markup/review, and many are issued as hard copies to be retained on-site (within switchrooms, cabinets, etc).

I'm told by relatives that paper remains the easiest way to transfer medical records, either by courier or by fax, which are then scanned in. The move to electronic medical records has reduced the need to store paper records (which, interestingly, is expensive), but it hasn't done much to reduce the amount of paper consumed.

It amazes me how little integration there is between medical systems, even now. I recently experienced being transferred into the local hospital's emergency department by ambulance, and while both ambulance and hospital had fully digital records, they had to manually copy everything off the ambulance's tablet screen into the hospital's system. And then at the end of the process a letter was printed to be sent to our doctor, and presumably entered into the database that they use.

I get that integration is hard, but the number of errors that must be introduced with so much transcription is ridiculous.

Not sure where they get their figures from but according to http://www.thepaperlessproject.com/facts-about-paper-the-imp... the average office worker continues to use a staggering 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year.

I've been around lots of government offices, and all of them generate vast piles of paper for internal uses, often one time use.

Youd be amazed at the number of insurance companies with pretty web front ends and paper records behind it all at the other end

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