Whatever happened to the paperless office? And is it even a good idea? Adam Wakelin investigates

Anyone who has not spent the last week locked in a wardrobe might recall there has been a bit of a hoo-ha about iPads. Four Leicester city councillors were getting them at the taxpayer's expense, it emerged, and all hell broke lose.

Hardly surprising, really. When 1,400 council staff face losing their jobs, it wasn't the cleverest expression of We Feel Your Pain local politics.

Councillor Sarah Russell, one of the not-entirely-lucky iPad recipients, tried to justify it by saying iPads could save the authority up to £80,000 a year in printing costs if all the agendas and reports were downloaded to such devices.

That justification went pretty much unheard in the outraged din and Councillor Russell has now decided she doesn't want an iPad after all.

But, leaving aside the fact that most councillors already have laptops to go paperless with, was the cabinet lead for the environment on to something?

Aside from the purported cash saving from doing away with all those documents, you would also save tonnes of trees.

Which has to be a good thing. Or does it?

Forests soak up millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. You plant a tree, chop it down, pulp it and grow some more, which makes paper an endlessly renewable resource.

Better, possibly, than burning gas and oil to make the electricity to power all those laptops and iPads that get junked every few years.

So is that long cherished ideal of the paperless office really a green red herring?

Trying to work out the most eco-friendly option is not easy, says city council sustainable procurement officer Helen Lansdown.

Helen can say that with confidence, because she's tried.

Broadly speaking, downloading a document of more than 75 pages to a computer is more energy efficient than printing off a hard copy, Helen discovered.

Reports produced for a typical council cabinet meeting eat up 1,404 sheets of paper.

So, deliver that information on a single computer hooked up to a projector and you do make a carbon saving.

But that 0.006 tonnes of carbon makes a "pretty insignificant difference", says Helen, whom points out that it doesn't take into account things such as the energy needed to make that computer full of components, the fuel burned to import it from the Far East, or the greenhouse gases released when it needs to be recycled.

Neville Stork, Leicester's head of environmental sustainability, believes we shouldn't get too carried away by the ability of information technology to make our offices greener.

Computers and iPads, he points out, are packed with "rare earth elements" – the semi-precious metals which make their circuit boards work.

The mining of these elements can be hugely damaging to the environment, says Neville.

Such metals are also scarce and some experts are predicting shortages by 2012.

"An iPad may save you X-sheets of paper, " he says. "But is it more sustainable if you are using a non-renewable resource to make it? I'm not so sure it is."

There is another problem with information technology, adds Neville. Rather than reduce our paper consumption, it actually seems to multiply it.

They have been talking about the paperless office since the 1970s, when a Xerox Corporation boffin called George E Pake coined the term for an article in Business Week.

He asked us to imagine a world where you could "call up documents from files on the screen" just by pressing a button, or get "mail or any messages" from a TV display terminal with a keyboard.

Pretty visionary stuff, but George was wrong about one thing – technology has not freed us from the shackles of the stationery cupboard.

If anything, it has made us more print-out crazy.

In 2008/09 the city council got through 64 million sheets of A4.

British offices, meanwhile, waste up to 120 billion pieces of paper every year, according to eco organisation Envirowise, which says a typical worker prints 22 pages of paper.

Paper might be greener than gadgets in some ways, but getting through it in such mountainous quantities is not good for the environment.

Trees can be replanted, but it takes years of growth before they start sucking significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere.

The industry used to make and recycle paper is also a considerable generator of greenhouse gases.

Paper is only sustainable if we use less of it, says Neville.

The council is trying to do that, reckons Helen.

"We are taking this seriously," she says. "All of our paper is 100% post-consumer recycled and we are trying to reduce the amount we use."

Aside from encouraging staff to think about what they make hard copies of, they are also reducing the number of printers so there is less of a temptation to run off reams of documents.

"There are also energy and cost benefits from doing that," says Helen.

In this straitened economic climate, money spent on paper is a big deal. Stop the unnecessary printing of e-mails, single-sided printing and the sending of massive documents to the printer, and you can save 20% on paper, says Envirowise.

Technology can play a part, it seems, but we have to change our way of working with it.

Councillor Russell says she has been pushing for the authority to use less paper.

Her decision to trial an iPad, she says, was driven by a genuine desire to see if it could cut paper consumption.

That idea may have backfired, but she will continue to argue for things such as planning applications to be sent to councillors digitally.

"It's an ongoing battle," she says. "The amount of paper we hand over to be recycled is quite staggering.

"With a lot of environmental issues, there are multiple arguments. You have to try to listen to those arguments and find a way through – even if the answer isn't definitive."