The Paper Deluge : Workplace: If it can be printed out, it’s probably stashed away in a warehouse. Americans just can’t give up their note pads and hard copies.

The thick metal doors, equipped with a magnetic lock, open into a room the size of a football field. Inside, from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, sit tattered brown boxes, tens of thousands of them, all stuffed with documents.

There are 19 other rooms just like this one at the Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Md., a sprawling warehouse for 8 billion of the federal government’s old policy papers, budget projections, meeting minutes and research reports. And every day, truckloads of new boxes arrive--at a rate 50% faster than old ones are being destroyed.

Places such as this Suitland facility and dozens of document warehouses serving private business in the area are supposed to be the dinosaurs of our day, the last vestiges of a time before computers rendered the printed form obsolete. Instead, the potent combination of technology and a seemingly intractable human craving for hard copies is driving a paper explosion that shows no signs of abating.

In the last decade, the country’s annual rate of paper consumption nearly doubled. In cities such as Washington--the epicenter of the paperwork boom--both private and government offices are so overflowing with documents that an entire industry has emerged whose sole purpose is to tame the paper jungle through elaborate storing and sorting techniques.

“No one would dispute that Washington is the paper capital of the world,” says Red Cavaney, president of the American Forest and Paper Assn.

In effect, paper is the currency of Washington’s economy, the means by which its law firms, lobbyists, associations and federal agencies distribute their products. Last year alone, according to paper-industry estimates, offices in the area consumed so much copier paper that if laid end to end, it would reach to the moon and back nine times over.

Although the growth in the federal bureaucracy and the region’s service sector is a contributor, new office technologies are the primary propellant of the paper epidemic, Cavaney and others say.

What computers have done, in essence, is bestow independence on thousands of office workers who once needed a secretary to type and produce documents. With their own PCs, most of them can draft memos and reports. They can enlarge charts and make color reproductions on ultra-equipped copier machines. They can use the fax machine to disperse copies or program it to shoot batches of paper all over the country.

In theory, since a single 3.5-inch computer disk can hold the equivalent of 240 sheets of paper, the use of printed documents should decline. In practice, technology seems only to feed consumption.

Any effort to change this becomes a fight with habits ingrained over a lifetime.

“The computer still hasn’t solved a lot of psychological issues,” said Stanford University professor Clifford Nass, who studies social patterns and technology. “People like to hold paper; they like printouts. If the information only exists in the computer, where is it? You can’t tell people it’s being stored as a bunch of ones and zeros. They want to touch it.”

That’s how William Davis feels. He was on his way to work in Rosslyn, Va., one day recently with a thick stack of papers in his hand.

“I use a ton of paper at work, for memos, or reports, and I get copies of other people’s memos and reports,” said Davis, who works for a computer hardware company. “I always make printouts of things I have electronically, because it feels safe. Anything can happen to a computer.”

Industry focus groups have shown that people get a physical comfort from handling paper, from marking it up with colored pens and taking it home in a briefcase. People regularly underestimate how much paper they consume.

None of this should suggest that computers aren’t reducing the use of paper at all. Sending messages via electronic mail, a favorite pastime in many offices, has reduced the use of note pads and scratch paper, Cavaney said.

Many offices are increasing the amount of business they do over the telephone and feeding information directly into computers. They also are storing more documents on microfilm and using optical scanners to convert typed pages into electronic forms. But practices such as these seldom make up for the growing amounts of paper used in other parts of the workplace.

A lot of this paper has a relatively short life span in the office--it gets recycled or ends up in a landfill. The rest enters a peculiar sort of no-man’s-land, sitting in a file cabinet or a cardboard box, waiting for the day when someone comes to retrieve it--or destroy it.

It is this last pile of documents, those that get saved, that causes the most consternation in the workplace, because saving those papers means finding a place to keep them and remembering where they are.

No single entity has a tougher time of it than the federal government. To keep order, it has developed a thick book recommending how long agencies should hold on to paperwork, from vehicle repair and maintenance receipts (three months) to budget estimates (10 years).

Some paper gets stored at individual agencies, but most goes to Suitland, where it is issued a number, entered into a computer and assigned a spot to sit until its disposal date.

Given the broad span of affairs in which the federal government gets involved, documents quickly build up. The Office of Thrift Supervision, for example, has 440 cubic feet of documents stored in Suitland that relate just to the Lincoln Federal Savings & Loan scandal, enough to fill 55 filing cabinets.

The Justice Department has 160 cubic feet packed away on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Canceled Treasury checks take up 350,000 cubic feet.

All this means that space is a prized commodity, and one in increasingly short supply.

“Documents are always being destroyed, but as fast as we can clear out 5,000 feet, some agency is knocking at the door wanting to fill it,” said Ferris E. Stovel, director of the federal records center. “Clearly, we’re losing the battle.”

In November, a 1.8 million-square-foot facility opened in College Park, Md., to warehouse federal documents. But so much bureaucratic paperwork is waiting to get in that the new complex will be one-third full in a few months, according to the National Archives.

Space also is quickly filling up at the document-storage facilities that serve private businesses in the area. Professional Records Storage, which opened in Landover, Md., in 1980, has the capacity to hold enough square-foot file boxes to stretch for 90 miles if they were lined up in a row. With the warehouse taking in enough paperwork each month to fill a half-mile row of boxes, company president Robert Larson figures that he’ll be out of space and shopping for more in about 18 months.

When Larson first opened for business, he had two competitors. Now, about two dozen Washington area companies do nothing but store and retrieve documents.

Keeping track of paperwork at facilities such as these is an art. At Larson’s Professional Records Storage, every box is assigned a bar code, like the ones used for scanning prices in grocery stores. Through a computer, the staff can locate any box and know what documents it contains.

Day or night, clients can call the company or reach one of its employees by beeper, who will then locate the needed documents and deliver them within hours.