Make the Shift to Smart Printing Habits

Overusing printers not only wastes paper, it wastes ink and entails more frequent maintenance than if a “smart” printing system were in place. Smart printing encourages keeping the printing of documents to a minimum for the sake of both our environment and operating costs. Below are several methods by which you can implement smarter printing habits.

First off, before printing any documents, make a habit of considering whether it will be put to justifiable use before being discarded. It is all too common for documents to become outdated faster than they are printed; instead, email yourself a copy or save it to your computer’s hard drive. Also avoid printing several copies of a document to hand out to colleagues when you can simply forward the document via e-mail or create a power point presentation.

When printing off documents is absolutely necessary, you can still reduce the amount of paper and ink you use. Two ways for saving paper is to shrink documents to fit two or more pages to a side, and to use both sides of every sheet of paper. It is also very environmentally friendly to purchase recycled paper which is made up of at least 30% post-consumer waste and to avoid paper containing chlorine.

As for environmentally friendly inks, soy and vegetable based inks have been developed for offset printing as an alternative to the much more harmful petroleum based inks, which contain cancer-causing carcinogens. Metallic and fluorescent inks also contain harmful substances like barium, zinc, and copper and should be avoided. For high gloss documents such as brochures, you can use a biodegradable varnish as opposed to film lamination.

You can also influence the implementation of a smart printing system by instructing your email recipients to consider the environment prior to printing the email. It is also proactive to place recycling containers in highly visible, high traffic areas throughout the building. Much paper gets thrown in the trash for lack of a more conveniently placed recycling receptacle. Simply giving someone their own personal recycling bin can be enough to change environmentally unfriendly habits.

There are also environmentally conscious decisions you can make while actually designing your document. Avoiding ink bleeding (which requires larger paper) and always sticking to standard paper sizes or smaller will make a difference in your ink and paper usage.

Many designers have now developed environmentally friendly alternatives to the more traditional design layouts. For example, you can now choose to use Eco or Ever Green fonts which use up to 15% less ink than conventional fonts. In addition, ink cartridges for laser and inkjet printers are being made out of recycled materials, some of which can even be refilled by the consumer. Purchasing these kinds of products is a great way to immediately lessen your material consumption. In any case, following any one of the above tips will make a difference in not only your printing expenses, but most especially in the community and environment.

Related Topics:

1. Green Habits Everyone Should Have
2. Tekniq Data Corp. Plants 1,000 Trees
3. Is Your Home Office Eco-Friendly?