Instead of shrinking, paper sales ballooned. And the biggest beneficiary was Canada, the world's largest exporter of office printing paper, which more than doubled its exports in the last 15 years the height of the computer revolution. In yet another case of the old economy's bouncing back with a vengeance, paper companies around here are riding what may be the biggest printing boom in history. The computer age has produced a golden age of paper, putting aside 1980's predictions that new paper mills would one day be as unnecessary as new power plants. Office paper is the fastest- growing segment.
People print out everything they see Web sites, e-mail.
A few steps from his office, acres of white paper race onto rolls at 75 miles an hour, then fly through a gantlet of sheeters and slitters, emerging at the rate of 53,000 sheets, or 106 packaged reams, a minute. Hewlett-Packard, the printer manufacturer, forecasts that North American laser printers will spew out 1.2 trillion sheets this year a jump of more than 50 percent in five years. Fax machines, photocopiers and other devices add to that. With Americans unable to stop clicking their print icons, Canada's paper mills ran at 94 percent of capacity last year, exporting a record 31.5 million tons of white paper, largely to the United States. Printing and writing papers, the fastest-growing segment of paper exports to the United States, grew 14 percent in 2000.