Characteristics
Overview
Paper, a ingredient for Building plan and Note.
You can skip it. Paper cannot be crafted or researched at all, so the only sheets you will see come from loot or a trade. Its own description says it goes into a building plan and a note. On the data this site holds, though, both of those craft straight from wood, and no item lists paper as an ingredient at all.
So a sheet in your inventory is junk with a small refund. A recycler hands back two to four wood for it, depending on the machine, which is about all it is good for.
The usual scene: a new teammate reads the tooltip, hunts the crafting menu for paper before a build and then wonders why it is not there. Tell them to craft the plan itself. It takes twenty wood, and nobody needs paper for it.
Recycling
At power grid stage 2 a green recycler works at 60% instead of 50%. Yields depend on the recycler.