I keep thinking about how printing changed. We went from massive metal fonts and centralized presses to the current desktop regime by degrees. The first step was very limited kind of printing – the dot matrix “we give you one crappy font and you need specialized paper”. It wasn't useful for much, but it was useful for some things, and used frequently enough that it was worth developing improvements.

This led to laser printers and better and better ink technology and now it's reasonable for most people to have a pile of paper and a printer that cost them next to nothing and for businesses to have stockrooms laden with the raw materials of documents. And at the same time, print shops stayed a step ahead, selling the ability to print nicer things than you could at home.

So yeah, maybe early home 3d printers use only plastic and can only make objects that fall within certain performance restrictions. Maybe it starts out as, like, jewelry and the latest in cup designs.

But we can print Steel now (though no word about the strength of the resulting models). Jay Leno replaces car parts and tools by rapid prototyping.

I imagine there is a convergence from the other direction. Materials and formats fall out of favour because they are hard to make rapidly. Like how most documents are 8.5×11 (or A4) these days.

That said, I take your point about archival materials, though most contracts only need to last about 7 years and we are pretty good at keeping digital versions around for that long. I think there is some evidence that we think we are getting better at this. More and more companies offer digital-only billing. Banks in particular are willing to deal with you almost entirely through electronic logins.

Besides this, the lawyers require hard copies for years after the building is completed just in case somebody screwed up and blame needs to be apportioned (Sam made a point similar to this above).

The first is the hard copy of documents. Keeping paper copies of contracts and stuff may seem unnecessary until you remember just how bad our track record of saving digital media is. Paper copies are easy to store, last a long time (longer than any digital media available today) and never go obsolete. I don't think there is any proof that we are getting better at this!

The second is manufacturing on site as appose to shipping.
this would save less transportation costs than you would think. You still need to ship all the raw materials to the destination. One could make the argument that you would be harvesting raw materials from things you didn't need anymore, but people are really bad at throwing things out.

You will also need to transport the energy used to create the new thing. For lots of materials the energy to create something is way more than the energy to transport it. That is why energy intensive manufacturing is centered around places with cheap energy costs, such as Aluminum smelting in BC and Quebec. California can't support the energy requirements of reconstituting old objects into new useful objects. It makes more sense to ship the raw goods somewhere with cheap labour and energy costs to get recycled and manufactured again.

3d printing may be doing well with plastic parts, but it is also a long way from competing with casting, forging, stamping and extruding to create metal parts. You can machine things, but there is no technology that allows you to print strong 3d metal parts and there are some huge technical barriers to creating one.