The electronic books and communications have absolutely solved many of these problems. I remember that we used to suffer alot from the number of papers we have.
One of my friends used to work in a cartoon animation company and they were suing the old style paper drawing, he told me that they had rooms full of papers that are terminated by burning them after every 5 years.

One thing that worries me is that I have yet to see research on what the difference is, if any, the carbon footprint of doing these things online over doing them the “old fashioned” way.

Too often people just accept that these types of things are “greener” because it seems to make sense. But are they really?