So, what do people print that they don't have to? Plenty!
E-mail
By far, the worst culprit has to be e-mail. Everywhere I've
worked (either as a full-time employee or on contract), the
document you see most coming out of the printer is e-mail.
You'd think that employees delete the messages they've
printed. They don't. Most of the time they never refer to
either the digital version or the hard copy.
Drafts of Documents
The next greatest waste of paper is the printing of draft
documents at every stage of production. This may have been
necessary in the days before WYSIWYG but now it's just a
waste of paper. While WYSIWYG is actually "what you see is
(sort of) what you get," the on-screen view gives a more than
adequate impression of what a document looks like. Even the
revision process can be automated.
Using Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, anyone with access to a word processor file can mark up or edit it. The revisions are
automatically tracked and can be viewed without pressing the
Print button. But people still press that button anyway.