What is the Impact of Paper Use?

Recently Lake Maquarie City Council (Australia) made their Development Application form 8 pages plus a five 5 page checklist instead of 2 pages.

This is the enviromental impact as far as I can calculate it:

There were 3584 applications for housing and 317 for other buildings, totalling 3901 per year.
At 11 extra pages per application that's 42,911 pages EXTRA per year!

This is equal to 86 reams of paper.
At 2.48 kg per ream this is 213 kg of paper (or refined trees) which has the embodied energy of of 0.05Gj/kg.
This is 10.64 Giga Joules of embodied energy use per year!

This also has an environmental footprint of 0.1ha - In the physical real world those extra pages are affecting, or using, 0.1ha of land.

Now, I have to keep a copy of these extra pages and I'd say many others do too - so lets say 1/3 again. So those extra pages mean approximately 14.2GJ of energy use impact and 0.13 ha of land somewhere in the world is being affected.

And Lake Macquarie City council is going to directly cause this increase in impact each year!

The numbers come from a thesis by Kay Flint completed in 1999 at the University of Newcastle, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences. These figures are used by the University of Newcastle to calculate their impact.

There is another impact. In buildings that are porly ventilated photocopying can case Sick Building Syndrome. As a society we should limit our exposure to chemicals. Therefore for this reason also the number of copies made should be limited- especially unnecessarily.