The first newspaper office I worked in was a firetrap. In those days of typewriters and teleprinters, paper was piled high on desks, stuffed to overflowing in filing cabinets, layered on floors and tumbling out of rubbish bins. When the first computer showed up a year or so later, talk began that one day in the not-too-distant future, the working environment would be paperless. Three decades on and I'm the only one among my journalist colleagues living that future.
My secret is sightlessness. Without the ability to read printed paper, I'm left to using speech software on my computer. I can't see pictures and diagrams, so need those to be described, but virtually all else is available through the internet and e-mails.
The click-clack of typewriters and the chatter of teleprinters have long gone from newspaper offices, but the piles of paper haven't. A stroll around the newsroom floor revealed that each desk has at least one stack, newspapers and books are strewn about and boxes filled with notebooks abound. One colleague, in a blast back to yesteryear, has a one-metre-plus mountain of papers. My desktop is the only one with sweeping vistas of nothingness. It's a rarity in my office and, it would seem, the world over.
Like elsewhere, my office is trying to reduce paper usage. Cutting costs and being environmentally responsible is what we all have to do - especially when one-third of what goes into our shrinking landfills is paper. Printers and photocopiers can only be used with staff cards, and paper is recycled. Despite that, the paperless office that George Pake, Xerox PARC founding director, foreshadowed in a Businessweek article in 1975 remains a myth.
In it, Pake predicted that, by 1995, office desks would have a 'TV-display terminal with keyboard'. 'I'll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,' he told the magazine. 'I can get my mail or any messages. I don't know how much hard copy I'll want in this world.' He had the hardware part and the rush to embrace it right, but didn't count on habits being hard to break.
A recent Europe-wide study by the American printer company Lexmark found that office workers each printed an average of 31 pages a day, a number that has changed little in recent years. Between 2007 and 2009, waste per employee increased from six to seven pages. In the United States, surveys have shown that while paper usage peaked in 2001 with each worker using 68kg a year, declines are only slight, falling by just 0.9 per cent annually. I don't have any survey data from Hong Kong to give comparisons, but I know we're well behind the curve when it comes to most global trends. If my office is any guide, we're printing out e-mails and PDF files as much as ever.