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Tips on How to Save Paper when Printing

With the Copenhagen Summit coming up and much ado about “Climategate” populating the web, we figured it just might be a good time as any to revisit the little things we the ordinary people can do towards reducing our carbon footprint and remind our readers about the environmentally-friendly and paper-reducing printing habits that we can all develop in order to make that possible. So here, once again, are tips on how to save paper while printing.

printer paper One basic printing “tenet” that would do us good to live by is to choose what we print wisely. Gone are the days of indiscriminate printing, when we printed practically anything and everything. First, decide whether something is, indeed, worth printing. Next, decide whether you really need to print the whole darn thing or just portions of it. If you don’t need it all, choose only those portions that are important. There are even tools available nowadays to help you do that. One can scour the web for them, or simply resort to copying, cutting and pasting material onto MS Word.

It will also be good to “categorize” your printing activities and choose the appropriate media – as well as printer settings – that you do these with. For instance, information that does not need to be ultra-perfect and in full color may be printed in Black and White and in Draft mode. One can also choose to print it in recycled paper, and we do not just mean those reams with the word “recycled” stamped on them on Office Max. You may want to check out discarded reports and other used sheets of paper with clean backs to print on.

Another paper-saving practice is duplex printing; not all important documents have to be printed one page at a time. Print on both sides if it is at all possible; and if you want to take that a step further, you can even choose to print multiple pages on one sheet of paper as well.

Remember, in the final analysis, it is the little things, taken together, that can make a world of difference.