I first started noticing the little "green" appends to e-mail signatures about two years ago. You've all seen them: "Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail." I found them amusing at first. Now they are just annoying. But they got me to think about a few things.

In the first place I never print e-mail–unless there is some extraordinary reason to do so. And I thus assumed that the average information worker did the same. OK, I did have a CEO who had his secretary print out every one of his e-mail messages for his perusal. But this guy also used paper 9 1/4″ x 11 7/8″ ledger sheets instead of spreadsheet software to analyze financials, so I figured this was an anomaly.

Then I ran across the following factoid on infoworld.com: "The average office worker goes through as many as 10,000 sheets of paper a year." That is two cases of paper or twenty 500-sheet reams. That supposedly represents an entire tree's worth of wood pulp. I believe most paper is actually manufactured from recovered or recycled paper and wood waste from lumber manufacturing. So, in fact, the use of paper isn't necessarily depleting natural resources, but that is off point. Manufacturing paper consumes large quantities of energy from nonrenewable resources, and we will postulate without further discussion that using paper to display information isn't green.