Paperless office? 2.8 trillion pages printed in 2020, down by 14% or 450 billion sheets

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Big brands might take solace that in 2025, 4.4 million pages will still be printed every minute.

Around 450 billion fewer pages were printed from home and office devices in 2020 as COVID-19 disrupted the world of work.

The direction of travel has been obvious in recent times: people were printing less even before the pandemic took hold, but the decline was sharper last year as volumes plunged 14 per cent on 2019 levels to a total of 2.8 trillion pages, according to IDC.

Unsurprisingly, employees being asked to stay indoors and work from home caused the number of laser pages printed to fall 16 per cent, a drop that was even more pronounced for A3 devices.

Conversely, pages printed on inkjet printers went up by 4 per cent compared to the prior 12 months. Inkjets were typically used mostly for personal printing before COVID-19 turned the world upside down.