Is Ours a "Paper-less" Society?

There is an interesting new StatsCan report out with useful data on all aspects of information technology, but one table in particular caught my eye. It is used to support the authors' argument that, contrary to received wisdom, paper consumption is climbing in our supposedly paper-less society:

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It is deliciously contrarian, but there is a problem. Why should we care about raw consumption of paper? The relevant stat is paper consumption per capita, not in aggregate. And when you look at that figure in Canada and the U.S. you see that per capita paper consumption has declined in recent years, not increased. Granted, there was a huge spike in per capita paper consumption between 1983 and 1993, but it has fallen since then.