Regular readers will know that nothing has me reaching for the beta-blockers faster than the misinformation propounded by the dreaded 'save trees do you really need to print this' email sign-off. Worse is if I see it attached to anything sent out by a print-related business, at which point I have to go for a little lie-down in a dark room.

This ire doesn't stop me from appreciating the difference between saving trees that don't need to be saved, and the need to use our resources wisely.

One only needs to take a walk through the average office (PrintWeek Towers being no exception) to see the amount of wasted paper that resides by printers and photocopiers simply because people don't think about what they're doing before they hit print. The interweb is a major culprit in all this wasted paper, too, because websites in general are not formatted in a way that allows optimally efficient printing, so unless everyone with access to a printing device can be relied upon to engage their brains prior to printing out (unlikely) this type of wastage will likely enough continue to grow.

While this type of print on paper issue can be deemed peripheral to us in the professional print world, I like to keep an eye on it due to the powerful printing-related messages - the save trees nonsense being an example - that can be communicated from an office and corporate level.

Some new research from Kyocera, which surveyed 1,000 UK office workers, has the average office bod consuming 10,000 sheets of paper per annum, with a whopping 68% of that output being deemed 'wasted or unnecessary'. Here's a graphic showing its results.

Kyocera has a vested interest in all of this, naturally, because it wants to promote its managed print service offering. It also puts some 1,100 sheets used for proofreading in this wasted or unnecessary category, which seems odd. Proofreading accurately on screen is a nightmare, whereas printing something out to read it properly should result in far fewer genuinely 'wasted' sheets down the line.