Millions on ink alone to print Facebook updates

In an indication of how the costs of communication have changed over the past decade, a survey has found that printing a year’s worth of Facebook status updates would be equivalent to printing over 500m Oxford English Dictionaries.

Such a print-run would require at least 11.5bn sheets of paper, and €147.2m for ink alone, according to Cartridge Save, the UK firm that compiled the data from a survey of 2,102 Facebook users.

The company says that the survey begs the question of how much paper and ink was used during the pre-IT era when ‘snail mail’ was the primary form of daily communication.