Over the past countless decades, there has been controversy between environmental activists and the governments over the depletion of forests and rainforests. It had been calculated that if people kept using and wasting paper like they had been throughout the past centuries, the supply of trees and rainforests would be completely depleted by the year 2090. In 2045, a United Nations sub-committee was developed in order to come up with a solution to replenish the World’s tree supply and rainforest acreage.
Another reason that the U. N. sub-committee needed to come up with a solution to the tree depletion is its economic impact. Since trees and rainforests are becoming so scarce, the price of paper began to skyrocket. In 2002 the average cost to print a sheet of paper at Kinko’s was twenty cents or less. By 2040, that price rose to $5.50 per sheet and people became more and more reluctant to print anything. For example, most high school teachers and university professors had their students submit term papers and class projects via the World Wide Web. Businesses changed from using hard-copy paper files and documents to only using computer desktop files. Almost no one could afford to send mail through the post office because the price of stamps reached $10.75 due to a lack of postal service usage.
With the early acceptance of such Internet communication tools as instant messaging and electronic mail, the U. N. sub-committee made the decision that all postal mail would be sent through electronic mail, and the postal services would be completely dismantled. Systems UPS and FedEx merged into “FedUPS” for package deliveries (with the innovation of “Plastix,” the heavy-duty packaging replacement for cardboard boxes).
The U. N. sub-committee also noted that with the invention computers during the twentieth century, more and more people were saving documents to disks and hard drives. And with recent advances in technologies, there was no dire need to even print these documents. The people who needed to see them could easily access them, or send them via e-mail. Therefore, the U. N. sub-committee concluded that the usage of paper in the public domain was virtually unnecessary.
In 2050 a law was passed for the entire world that forbid the buying, selling, or use of paper in the public domain. Certain government branches were still allowed a limited supply of paper for important documents that required hard copies. The purpose of this law was to invite technological advances, to replenish the world’s supply of trees and rainforests, and to stimulate further communication via technology.