When estate lawyer Merwyn Miller decided to go "paperless" in 2002, he wasn't trying to save the rain forests or make some other environmental statement.

The idea came from his wife, who refused to give up more of her laundry room for boxes of old documents that Miller didn't have space for at his Southern California office.

He started to eliminate paper by scanning documents into his computer, limiting his copies and asking himself at every turn whether having a printed page was necessary.

Today, Miller figures he has trimmed his paper use by 90 percent or more - saving money, time and space. Each of his case files went from more than 500 pages to about 30. He estimates that the annual saving amounts to roughly 7,000 pages.

In retrospect, Miller said, "I take a certain amount of pride in not wasting resources, particularly where I can get all these other benefits."

Thanks to the "green" era of environmental consciousness nationwide, conservationists are finding it easier to spread their message against paper waste.

"There is a resurgence by organizations and individuals to reduce paper consumption, and a trend toward people understanding how being more efficient is good for the bottom line and issues like climate change," said Joshua Martin at the Environmental Paper Network, an alliance of conservation groups in Asheville, N.C. The coalition tries to reduce pollution from paper production and minimize paper consumption.

Trimming paper waste is part of a set of actions people are taking amid growing concern about global warming and its effects. Many residents are taking small steps toward sustainable living - such as reusing shopping bags, buying energy-efficient light bulbs and reducing car trips. "It's about the choices we all make every day," said Will Craven of Forest Ethics, an environmental group based in San Francisco.

The rise of the personal computer in the 1970s sparked interest in the "paperless office," but the ideal never materialized. In fact, nationwide paper use rose steadily through most of the 1990s, partly because people printed so many documents they found on the Internet. In addition, toxic compounds contained in computers and other electronic devices have caused pollution around the world when the machines aren't recycled properly.

Nothing suggests that the "paperless office" will ever become a widespread reality. But an increasing number of businesses, environmental groups and conservation-minded citizens have adopted practical and simple ways to curtail use of paper products. They target both the home and workplace with initiatives focusing on the likes of copiers, printers, bills and junk mail.

Americans used about 97 million tons of paper last year, according to the Paper Industry Association Council.

Consumption of paper and paperboard in the United States was by far the highest in the world in 2006, but second-place China is catching up, according to paper-industry-analysis company RISI. Its projections show that China could surpass the United States in about five years. That's partly because U.S. paper consumption fell 8 percent by 2007, compared with the peak year of 1999, when the nation used more than 105 million tons.

Some analysts predict continued lessening in U.S. demand for paper, largely because of growing reliance on the Internet for news, ads, catalogs and other items that once were available only on paper. Like most products, paper comes with environmental baggage. Cutting trees and processing wood pulp contribute to deforestation, climate change, air and water pollution and habitat loss for numerous species, according to a 2007 State of the Paper Industry report from the Environmental Paper Network.

Recycling is one way to reduce paper's ecological "footprint." Even though paper recycling has increased steadily over the past decade, huge volumes of paper still end up in landfills.

Promoting a "paperless" ideal was silly from the start, said Bruce Nordman, who has studied paper use as a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area. "We don't want to stop using paper. We just want to use less of it," Nordman said.

For a parallel, he points to how Californians have learned to curb their use of electricity and become national leaders in power conservation.

Various signs suggest that a similar shift is starting with paper.

Officials at the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board recently digitized hundreds of thousands of documents. By giving hard drives to those who needed the documents, the agency avoided making stacks of copies.

"Once you take the mind-set that you are going to have zero impact on the resources of the planet, then you discover all kind of creative and innovative things," said Carolyn Chase, founder of San Diego EarthWorks, which coordinates the region's annual EarthFair.

Chase has made a habit of limiting her paper waste by printing on the clean side of unneeded documents. When she first did so, it confused city officials.

"They used to look at the other side and they would say, 'What is on there?'" said Chase, a former member of San Diego's Planning Commission. "Now, they ... don't look at the back."

Nationwide, various conservation groups and businesses are working to slash the amount of paper that arrives in people's mailboxes. The average American household gets 19 bills and statements a month, according to the PayItGreen Alliance, a group of financial-services companies. Switching to electronic bills, statements and payments can save a family an average of 6.6 pounds of paper per year. There's also growing interest in reducing unwanted mail, much like the "do not call" registry designed to block telemarketers.

The U.S. Postal Service estimates that in all, Americans receive more than 100 billion pieces of advertising mail annually. By one estimate, more than 40 percent of it goes unopened into landfills.

Then there's GreenPrint, a software company in Portland, Ore., that helps computer users identify pages they don't need to print. For instance, printing from the Internet commonly produces pages with just a few lines of type, or only ads, or text that can't be read because the margins are skewed.

About five years ago, such problems grabbed the attention of GreenPrint founder Hayden Hamilton. He was working at a large office for Ford Motor Co. in London at the time.

"Every morning ... I'd pass 20 to 30 print stations, and by 10 a.m., all of them were filled up with orphan pages," Hamilton said. He now promotes software to avoid that. A free version of the program, which includes ads, is available atprintgreener.com.

"What we wanted to do was solve a common frustration ... and eliminate waste in the process," Hamilton said.

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