No, according to this World Wildlife Federation web site WWF is a new, non-printable email format - like PDF but unable to print!
The idea is that you create documents in WWF and email them to people - and the recipients cannot ever print the document. This supposedly saves on destroying trees and forests for the production of paper.
Recently I was reading about how the modern lumber industry works related to recycling and "not printing". Apparently a lot of the "replacement forestry" industry is driven by printing.
Printing requires paper, paper requires trees. In order to have plentiful supplies of paper forestry companies much replace the trees they cut down for paper. There is a relatively short (say twenty year) cycle for regenerating a forest from seedlings so constant demand for paper causes a great twenty (or whatever number of years) cycle forest replacement.
Reducing the demand for paper causes the cycle to slow down - slowing the replanting of replacement seedlings, etc.
Historically today's forest levels are at their highest in a century. According to the US government (see this (printable) PDF) forested areas of the US have been stable for at least the last 15 years or so. Apparently the US government does not think forests are declining or needing to be saved.
Traditionally forested land converts to agricultural land and back over time; that is land which is forest is cleared and used for agriculture and agricultural land, typical derived from clearing forests, is abandon and becomes reforested.
The real problem is having a world in which everything is based on technology "cleaner" or in some other way "better" than a less technological (paper based) system.
This is a much more complex question.
Paper is a renewable resource that biodegrades. So I can grow trees, process them into paper, and recycle the paper in some way back into biological components. This is not true with things like laptops and computers which require mining, chemicals like petroleum, and other non-renewable, non-degradable components to manufacture.
Though I have to agree that printed email is perhaps the most wasteful approach - requiring the worst of both worlds. Though it seems like this is an operational issue, i.e., the fault of the user, as opposed to a structural supply chain problem.
Many people do not like things on computer screens and so feel the need to print them - perhaps preferring to view them away from work or elsewhere.
Oh well - in any case WWF is probably not going to solve the problem of waste - particularly as it relates to email.
Many people never delete their email and so have historical histories of all their correspondence. Improvements in disk drive technology make the cost of keeping such a history very inexpensive. Personally I do not ever print any email unless its required for some business or government reason. While all this email might fit on a USB drive is the cost of the USB drive to the environment less than having printed all the email?
For that matter what would the environmental cost be of having to store and search and maintain all of that email on paper. Would you have to hire someone to come in a search manually for things? There would certainly be an environmental cost to that...
At the same time having giant plants spewing out petroleum byproducts as the necessary infrastructure to produce a USB drive or computer less environmentally friendly?
I don't know the answers to all this and I think that before making rash statements one way or the other more homework is probably required...
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