Eco Tip: Green Printing

Did you know?

• In 2004 the United States used 8 million tons of office paper. That’s equivalent to 178 million trees!
• In the U.S. we have lost 95% of our old growth forests and 4281 acres of rainforest are lost every hour worldwide
• Global paper products consumption has tripled over the past 3 decades and is expected to grow by half before 2010.

If you’re like me, you know the frustration of printing a document or a Web page only to waste 1-3 pieces of paper. When I have the time, I have resorted to copying and pasting the information I need into a Word document before I print just to avoid this innocent yet harmful act. GreenPrint provides a really cool software solution and they even have a free version.  You can download it onto to your computer to help you eliminate those pesky extra pages that result from printing. It detects wasted pages (for example, a page with only one line of text on it) and deletes it from your print file.  Of course, you are in complete control over the process deciding if you want to print the page in question.  They also have an option to turn the desired page into a PDF, eliminating the need to print altogether.  Their worldwide version is free, but you can upgrade to their Premium or Enterprise versions.

It also tracks your impact from using the service, so you can see the difference you are making to help save the environment just from using this software.  They also say on their web site that if all US households with a computer used GreenPrint, we would save over $6 billion. And if all new computers sold in 2006 used GreenPrint, we would save over 36 million trees.  A Fortune 500 company using GreenPrint would save over $2 million, 4000 trees and prevent 12,623 tons of CO2 emissions every year.

It only took me a few minutes to download it and it is easy to use.  They provide an online demo and other interesting eco-facts about printing on the GreenPrint web site. To see some of their press coverage, check out CNN, CNBC, and TreeHugger.

Here’s a short video from CNN:

So, just by using GreenPrint, you help save paper, ink, money, and millions of trees – a simple way to protect the environment. 

~Melissa

Comments

[Blake]

That's pretty neat, I've never heard of that before.

At college we have a somewhat similar program called PaperCut I believe; it gives each student a certain amount of pages each semester before they have to pay extra. It also keeps track of you CO2 emissions and the number of trees you have used. It's pretty cool too.

[Derek]

This program misses the mark. It would seem to work okay for web pages where often the extra page contains nothing but a footer, but it falls short on things like word documents. The last lines of a word document are as critical as the first ones. Just axing them is pointless.

The software should be smart enough to "squish" or "reclaim" space so that it fits on fewer pages. If those last few lines are crucial, the software could decrease margins to fit it. Or if you are blocking a header image, the software should reclaim that space for text, rather than just not printing the images.

I think people would save much more paper by setting their printers to print multiple pages per sheet and print front and back if possible. I get 4 pages per page this way.

It's also worth mentioning that Mac OS X supports printing *anything* to PDF out of the box ;)

[klara]

great blog! i posted this up on http://sustain.newsladder.net/ ....similiar to Digg but centered around
sustainability...

bye!
Klara

[klara]

great blog! i posted this up on http://sustain.newsladder.net/ ....similiar to Digg but centered around
sustainability...

bye!
Klara

[PC]

The best way to eliminate waste is not to have it in the first place. www.YellowPagesGoesGreen.org is allowing consumers to opt out of the delivery of unsolicited Yellow and White Pages. www.YellowPagesGoesGreen.org has been started by a college senior and is rapidly expanding. Sign up and we will contact the publisher to stop the delivery.

[GoGreen]

Most of the popular green press is talking about how colleges are changing to energy efficient light blubs or publicizing recycling programs. These are great, but they never address the damage that college admissions contributes to the environment. They never factor in the amount of paper they waste as they calculate their carbon footprint.

It is estimated that colleges require us to process 755,000,000 paper documents each year as an incoming class. Our mailboxes get flooded with direct mail pieces ­ from schools we¹ll never attend. We have to fill out paper form after form as part of our applications sometimes to say the same things. And the paper trail continues until we get to campus, where apparently we can now recycle.

StudentsPlantTheSeed.com is a website that helps us identify this problem.
It also gives us a collective voice to tell our high schools and colleges that we want them to start using technology available now to eliminate paper. We¹re required to follow the same paper-based processes that our parents and even our grandparents had to follow. It¹s time for a change.

You can make a change by telling these institutions how you feel.