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"The growing omnipresence of email, social media and online data storage are enough to make you think excessive office paper waste is a thing of the past. A look at the numbers, however, reveals otherwise. And what's more, a lag on going totally paperless doesn't just hurt the environment \u2014 it's a huge burden on slow-to-adapt businesses as well. \nThe U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that some 5,260,000 tons \u2014 that's more than 10.5 billion pounds \u2014  worth of paper products were thrown out or recycled in 2010. And the cost on individual businesses is high: According to one estimate, the average employee goes through 10,000 sheets of paper per year, adding up to an $80 cost per employee per year. Mis-filed and tough-to-find hard copy documents also add to wasted labor time. \nGoing paperless isn't as hard as you may think. A single one-terabyte external drive can save as many as 500 million sheets of paper. A 150-page employee manual \u2014 pretty massive in real life \u2014 takes up less than 7.5% of a four-gigabyte flash drive. An entire filing cabinet's worth of documents would take up less than 60% of that same drive. \nThese stats and more were rounded up from across the web by Internet faxing firm MetroFax, and they're presented in the following infographic. Check out the full infographic below for the fuller picture, then give us your best paper-saving tips in the comments. \n\nThumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, NoDerog"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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