PAPER

When I was at school in the 1970's, there were a lot of rumours about an imminent paper shortage. Oil had suddenly become four times as expensive in 1973, and paper-making is (or was) a very energy-intensive industry. I don't know that all of the rumours were true, but it certainly provoked a lot of ill-informed teenage discussion in my class.

Looking back on that time, it all seems rather quaint. Because the fact of the matter is that our use of paper has fallen drastically in recent years. Denmark used 1.2 million tonnes in 1995, rising steadily to 1.45 million tonnes in 2006; it then fell back to under 1.1 million tonnes in 2009, and is forecast to keep on falling in the future.

The main reasons are declining sales of newspapers and the sharp drop in letters as a means of communication. Daily print runs of Danish newspapers fell from 1,438,000 in 2001 to 967,000 in 2011; and for Sundays, from 1,344,000 to 832,000. Letters sent through the post fell even more quickly, from 1.5 billion in 1999 to 777 million in 2011.

The meteoric rise of E-Mail, smart phones, sms's and other electronic media have made sending a letter rather old-fashioned. I once applied for a job, in which there were lots of candidates. I got an interview, at which the company said that they had noticed my application, since it was the only one that had come in the post and had a proper signature on it. It wasn't enough to get me the job, though ....

Walter Blotscher