Grow Me The Money Business Sustainability Forum

Printing duplex is good for two reasons as it costs less and saves paper, thus saving trees.

So by doubling up on your printing you will be saving money and saving the environment.

CAN YOU THINK OF ANY OTHER BENEFITS?

Interesting fact: If you fold a piece of paper only 42 times it will reach the Moon! Now whether you actually have the strength to fold it that many times is a slightly different matter....


There are in fact a lot more advantages to saving paper than simply savings trees and a few $$$.

Creating modern printing paper is an environmentally destructive process!

By cutting down on paper use you will not only save trees, you'll also be saving a LOT of water and energy as well as substantially reducing carbon emissions. Unfortunately I don't have the exact figures to hand but making a ton of paper uses several thousand litres of water and a whole heap of energy to harvest, process and transport.

One thing that you can do that is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than duplex printing is to simply not print at all (when viable) and buy 100% RECYCLED PAPER.

Even recycled paper has a carbon/water/energy cost, but these are much much lower than using unrecycled paper!

Duplex printing is one step that can be taken and there are many more. One is to ensure you don't print wasted pages. GreenPrint is a simple idea, but it solves a problem nearly everyone can relate to: The ubiquitous wasted page. This is the page with just a URL, banner ad, legal disclaimer, etc. These wasted pages occur many times a day littering homes and offices around the Australia and wasting money, trees, and time.

GreenPrint Home version is available for free when you register, again for free, with an energy saving campaign called Standby Saturday. www.standbysaturday.com.au

A multi user business version is available at www.greenerprinting.com.au

Happy sensible printing

Marcel

And don't forget 'multiplexing' when printing.

Multiplexing is the printing of more than one page of content onto a single side of paper. For example - it's perfectly feasible to print (and read) two A4 pages when printed on a single side of A4 sheet. It's possible to print as many as 8 pages (or more) on a single side, though it's impossible to read.

Why do this? Basically it reduces your paper consumption by 50% to print duplex as noted in above posts. It reduces 50% again when you print 2 pages on BOTH sides of the paper. That's 4 pages on your PC screen in say, Word) printed on one sheet of paper an overall reduction in paper use of 75% at no additional cost. It's feasible to print 4 pages on each side, so that's 8 pages when duplexed, a paper use reduction of 88%!!

What use is it to have so many pages printed so small? It's usually possible to read comfortably when 2 pages per side are printed. Imaging printing out those manuals and documents that you read one and then maybe file or throw away - reducing your paper use by 75%. An application of printing 4 pages per side is archiving. Many organisations (law firms for example) print copies of contracts and other documents to store as hard copy archives. They are rarely ever read again. Printing 4 pages per side reduces their paper consumption by 88% and they can still read the docs with the aid of a magnifier should the need ever arise.

How to do it? Next time you print a document - instead of just hitting the Print button - take a look at all of those options and pull down menus available and look for options such as 'pages per sheet' or 'scaling'. See attached file for a pic.



I've been doing this for about 25 years on Apple Mac printers and it's generally now available even on home ink jet printers.

Rgds, Tony.