Photo courtesy of darkmatter

Brinda Dalal an anthropologist working at Xerox came up with some interesting observations about the changing office in this New York Times article.

“What she has discovered is a notable change in the role of paper in modern offices, where it is increasingly used as a medium of display rather than storage. Documents are stored on central servers and personal computers and printed only as needed; for meetings, editing or reviewing information.

The pieces of paper spewed from copiers frequently end up back in the recycling bin on the same day they are printed, she noted.

Of the 1,200 pages the average office worker prints per month, 44.5 percent are for daily use — assignments, drafts or e-mail. In her research, scouring the waste produced by office workers, she found that 21 percent of black-and-white copier documents were returned to the recycling bin on the same day they were produced.