U.S. COMPANIES TAKE STEPS TO CUT SIZE OF FAX GLUT : BUSINESSES GUILTY OF OVERSENDING, OVER-RECEIVING, ASSOCIATION SAYS.

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 Sandy Doll, 5 feet, 4 inches, 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 around the globe 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 seems particularly onerous in the fields of communications, law and government, some organizations are turning to paperless electronic mail, ``900'' numbers to make senders pay for faxes, or shutting off the machines after hours or on weekends.

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 press 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 out 8,000 pages of fax every day, which costs the firm $1 per sheet.

Fax machines, short for facsimile, are devices that use telephones to transmit images of documents around the corner or around the globe almost instantly.

Indeed, the fax machine and its offspring - the fax glut - are relatively new phenomena. A decade ago, the approximately 500,000 installed fax machines were only used by large, wealthy companies and were slow and expensive.

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 now in use in the United States, according to an estimate by Giga Information Systems, an industry research group.

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 so-called electronic mail, messages transmitted by computer instead of paper.

The strategies being used to reduce fax glut vary from place to place.

At International Business Machines' office in Somers, N.Y., workers are turning to the personal computer fax/modem.

Office workers at the U.S. Supreme Court have figured out an answer to unwanted junk faxing - unpublished fax numbers.

The Miami Herald, a daily newspaper in Miami, has found another way. It is using ``900'' telephone numbers for incoming fax lines to its newsroom, requiring senders to pay $2 per fax.

Other businesses have considered turning off the fax machine over weekends or after business hours to cut down on junk faxes, a move environmentalists applaud for saving energy and paper.

Meanwhile, laws governing the distribution of unsolicited faxes are on the books in California and several other states.