SOME time next spring Lloyd’s of London is hoping to take delivery of a new art work to decorate its famous London headquarters.

The sculpture will consist of a white van crushed into a cube. The artist isn’t Damien Hirst or Rachel Whiteread, it’s Richard Ward, chief executive of the 319-year-old market. With it Ward hopes to mark a turning point in Lloyd’s battle against paper.

When Ward joined in 2006 he said he was “absolutely stunned” by the “vast quantities” of paper the insurance market generated. A colleague in IT told him that each day Lloyd’s was sending four tonnes of documents to its sorting office in Chatham, all carried by those white vans.

Lloyd’s will insure anything from a city against hurricanes to a movie star’s legs. And a lot of that work starts life on everything from Postit notes to the back of envelopes. Ward once met a colleague in one of Lloyd’s famous external lifts wheeling a suitcase he assumed she was taking on holiday. It turned out to be yet another pile of paper destined for Chatham.

“Given today’s technology, there’s no need for this enormous, time-consuming paper trail,” said Ward.

“Our goal is to have a single source of information that is accessible by all. That will reduce errors, speed up processing, payment of claims,” he said. When he has successfully made a dent on the paper pile, he intends to crush one of the vans.

For more than a decade computers, e-mail, and the internet have been heralded as a means to reduce consumption of paper for everything including printing and writing, newsprint and packaging. But far from ushering in a “paperless office”, computers and the internet have fuelled paper demand, with people routinely printing out digital documents including web pages and emails to receipts.

Some companies have made a valiant attempt to cut the paper chain. In 1995 Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou set up low-cost airline Easyjet as a paperless company. The management and administration is undertaken entirely on IT systems which can be accessed through secure servers from anywhere in the world.

“What I do is work via e-mail so even things that arrive in the office by hard copy have to be scanned and emailed to me for action,” said Haji-Ioannou.

But despite some successes the tide seems to be turned against them.

According to industry analyst Lyra Research 1,520 billion pages of documents were printed in 2006. In the US each man, woman and child uses 700lb of paper annually and the average office worker generates 2lb of paper waste per day.

The numbers are growing as the global economy expands, fuelled by the emerging economies of China, Brazil, Russia and India. And the numbers show little sign of slowing. World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank, estimates that globally paper consumption has increased by a factor of 20 this century, has more than tripled during the past 30 years, and is expected to grow by a further 50% by 2010.

“It’s a bit embarrassing really,” said Jim Joyce, Xerox’s vice-president of office services. “Twenty years ago in the early part of my career we were talking about the paperless office. If anything things have gone in the opposite direction.

“The wealthiest woman in China today owns a paper-recycling plant.”

But, said Joyce, there are finally signs that attitudes, at least, are changing. Xerox has been one of the firms advising Lloyd’s on ways to reduce its paper trail. The company’s office services division consults with many of the world’s top companies on ways to manage the documents they produce.

After a paper audit of one client, Dow Chemicals, Xerox found the firm had 16,000 printers across its offices producing 480m printouts a year. While each document printed cost little, in total all that printing added up to $100m over five years.

While technology now allows most documents to be stored digitally Joyce said cheap printers and the almost universal access to computers in offices meant more and more people were choosing to print out documents. And because the costs are small on an individual basis people don’t look at the big picture.

After Xerox’s audit Dow reduced its printer numbers to 5,000 and spends between 20% and 30% less on printing.

Joyce said while the technology has been available to digitise most documents for some time, companies have lacked the motivation. Until now. A new generation of managers, employees and customers have grown up with digital documents from text messages to e-mail and web pages. Psychologically it is less of a shift for them to move away from paper.

Second the environmental cost of all this paper use is an increasingly important factor for companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint.

“Europe is way ahead of the US on this,” said Joyce. “But when you look at paper, you have to look at the entire supply chain.” Along with the document itself there is the waste generated by the printer and its cartridges, the fuel to transport the paper and supplies and the manufacture of the paper. The paper industry is the fourth-largest industrial consumer of fossil fuels on the planet.

Digital documents also allow businesses to use information in new ways, making them searchable online by multiple users all at the same time.

But Joyce said while the argument for going paperless is stronger he doubts there will ever be a truly “paperless” office. “There are just some documents that people will never be happy with unless they have a physical copy,” said Joyce.

Nor does Ward believe that Lloyd’s should get rid of all its paper.

“It’s all about improving access to information,” he said.

In his last job as chief executive of International Petroleum Exchange (rebranded ICE Futures) Ward oversaw a move from an “open cry” market with traders to an electronic system that did away with many of those traders’ jobs.

At Lloyd’s Ward said he was not proposing getting rid of Lloyd’s underwriting room. “That works very efficiently,” said Ward. “What we are proposing is supporting the underwriting room with technology that works more efficiently,” he said.

He said the move to a less paper-heavy environment had started before he arrived. “What I’ve been doing is trying to add more impetus to make sure that idea is delivered.

“What we are doing is not earth-shattering. What we want to do is have all this information sitting on a server somewhere, accessible over the internet so that people wherever can access it.”

Ward’s attempts have been backed up with threats as well as encouragement and art work. Last month he threatened to publish the names of people falling behind on his targets and potentially to limit the amount of coverage sold by those who keep relying on paper slips.

“It’s one thing convincing people it’s a good idea, it’s another thing to actually get them to do it in practice,” said Ward.

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