FACT OF THE '90S: CONVENIENT FAX CREATING CLUTTER.

Byline: Kara Blond Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

At the American Management Association, which teaches businesses how to ``cut down on the paper pile,'' the fax machine hasn't learned the lesson.

Every month, it churns out more than 25,500 faxes from people around the world and sends out nearly 22,000 - each averaging three pages.

``If I stacked up a day's worth of faxes, like a tower, it would probably be 6 feet tall - over my head,'' said 5-foot-4 Sandy Doll, one of two full-time workers employed by the New York-based association to sort and send off faxes.

This year alone, an estimated 35 billion sheets of office paper costing some $174 million will be used in fax machines, according to a 1995 study by Boston-based Business Information Systems. Placed end to end, the sheets of paper would circle the Earth 241 times. Ten years ago, the trail would have barely made it 15 times.

Fax machines are doing what regular mail used to: creating an overwhelming paper trail of important documents, junk mail and unsolicited advertisements.

``Now it's about speed, volume and cost-efficiency,'' said Sarah Stambler, president of TechProse Inc., a small New York publishing firm, echoing those who have come to depend on the fax machine. ``We've gone way beyond the postal system.''

To combat the fax glut, which is particularly onerous in the fields of communications, law and government, some organizations are turning to paperless electronic mail or ``900'' numbers to make senders pay for faxes. Other businesses turn off the fax machine during weekends or after business hours to cut down on junk faxes, a move environmentalists applaud for saving energy and paper.

Despite their best efforts, most say nothing is working.

Laura Llanos, receptionist at Warren Publishing, in Washington, D.C., said she regularly returns to work after the weekend to find the two fax machines overflowing with faxes - and out of paper from the load. In the staggering pile, she'll find advertisements from local theaters, multiple copies of identical news releases and information about upcoming concerts.

The thousands of fax machines serving the White House and Congress run 24 hours a day, year-round, transmitting faxes of bills, schedules and position papers ``by the truckload,'' as one White House aide put it.

At White & Williams, a Philadelphia law firm, two outgoing fax machines send 8,000 pages every day, which costs the firm $1 per sheet.

The fax machine and its offspring - the fax glut - are relatively new phenomena. A decade ago, there were about 500,000 fax machines, all expensive and slow by current standards, and few but large, wealthy companies owned them.

Today, a standard business fax machine costs less than $1,000 and can send or receive more than 250 pages an hour. Less-sophisticated fax machines used at home, an increasing trend, cost much less. More than 13 million machines are in use in the United States, according to an estimate by Giga Information Systems, an industry research group.

``It has allowed us to cut down on express mail and quickly contact people around the world,'' said Virginia Sheridan, president of M. Silver Associates, a public relations agency in New York. ``Nearly 30 percent of our phone charges are probably faxes.''

The average Fortune 500 company spends 41 percent of its $37 million annual phone bill on fax costs, according to a 1996 Gallup/Pitney Bowes survey. For most businesses of any size, fax is second only to the telephone as the communication method of choice, the survey found.

At White & Williams, one incoming and two outgoing fax machines run 24 hours a day for the company's 150 lawyers. They receive 150 faxes a day, and send about 200 - each averaging 30 pages, according to Rasheed Knox, the company's 20-year-old fax operator.

``I can work nonstop,'' Knox said of the legal opinions, drafts of court briefs and correspondence. ``I can't even go to the bathroom because there's so much work to do. No one seems to care about the cost - they'll even fax one-word documents just because it's quick.''

Many company executives say some overworked fax machines are being relieved by personal computers that can receive fax transmissions without automatically printing them. People are also increasingly using electronic mail, messages transmitted by computer instead of paper.

Some companies like Intel Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have taken matters into their own hands, looking to e-mail as a quick-fix alternative to excessive faxing.

``We live and die by e-mail,'' said Intel spokesman Tom Waldrop, adding that Intel's network transmits millions of e-mail messages a day. ``If e-mail stopped, this company would grind to a halt. We wouldn't say the same thing about faxes.''

Many say that for forwarding and editing purposes, e-mail is a better alternative for in-company use. But employees still print out a good number of e-mail messages, and continue to rely on the fax machine for sending documents.