When an entire department of researchers wants a publication on paper, as well as people in other departments who need to occasionally draw on this field’s research, it makes sense for a single paper copy to be produced and held in a library where everyone can readily consult it without having to incur their own printing costs.

Printing costs are pretty much insignificant for documents as small as the typical publication. If you really like it to be on paper, printing ten pages, reading them and throwing them out is still cheaper than spending an extra ten minutes of your time to walk somewhere and fetch an existing copy. Printing a paper costs much less than a dollar in supplies, walking to a library costs much more than a dollar of paid-for time. In this case, convenience is cost efficient and it does not make sense to rely on centralized paper copies to try and save a few cents of toner.

Seriously, I'd only consider going to the library if I need a whole book (for a single chapter I wouldn't bother, digital or local printing is fine for that) or if the resource is not available in a digital format at all, which is getting exceedingly rare unless I need something really old. Especially if I've decided that I need paper X for whatever reason, then it'd be useful to read it right now at my desk instead of some time later this day after a visit to library.

When an entire department wants a publication on paper, a single copy in a library won't serve that need (since that copy can only be in one place at once). I experienced this in college (before electronic journals were widespread) with professors assigning a reading to an entire class and not providing copies.

The vast majority of scholarship is unlikely to be in any assigned reading list and the journal will probably be there sitting on the shelf when you want to have a look at it. In cases where there is suddenly high demand for it, then it makes sense to make copies of the article for everyone (or let them download a PDF), but I am happy that I don’t have to print myself everything I want to read.

Printing is significantly cheaper than a subscription to an Elsevier journal.

Please read my comment above. In my own field, none of our respected journals are produced by Elsevier (or a similar for-profit publisher). The non-profit learned societies that do publish our journals provide the PDFs free of charge, and for the paper copies they charge libraries only the cost of production – which also makes it possible for even individual scholars to often buy their own bound hardcopies.