Green Tip: Smart Printing = Green Thinking

Did you know that the average office worker uses 1.5 pounds of paper per day?  That’s 375 pounds per year.  In an office our size, approximately 150 employees (firm-wide), that’s 56,250 pounds of paper per year!  So, what can we do to save paper and a little green at the same time?  Here are a few ideas (for work or at home):

• Dedicate a copier or printer tray for draft documents. Then fill the tray with paper already printed on one side.
• Switch to duplex printing and copying. If possible, set printers and copiers so they default to double-sided printing.  David Korell and Daniel Bloor have kindly set this up for us in the Denver office, and I believe the Phoenix and LA offices are following suit.
• Use multi-up printing when possible. Some printers have drivers that can print multiple pages on a sheet.
• Consider using a different font for documents when possible.  For instance, by using the Arial Narrow font office paper can be reduced by approximately 15%.
• Consider adjusting page margins when possible.  MicrosoftWord default margins are generally set at 1.25” on each side.  Consider making an easy change, and setting your margins to .75” or less on each side.
• Only print the selections you need. If you need to print only a paragraph or two of a document, highlight it and use the Print Selection function.
• Use Print Preview and Shrink to Fit Functions. Use the Print Preview feature to ensure that what you are about to print is only what you need and intend to print.  Use the Shrink to Fit function to proportionally decrease the font size of text in the document to condense the text sufficiently to eliminate unnecessary text.
• Install software that eliminates unnecessary printout pages. Software, like Greenprint, FinePrint and HP Smart Web Printing can be used to eliminate wasted pages.
• Make use of PDF formatting and scanners to digitize hard copy data for storage.  Printing directly to PDF eliminates the need to print at all!

Still not convinced to change your paper-ways?...Please check out the facts below, and perhaps you will reconsider.

Paper Facts

• 1 ton of paper = 400 reams = 200,000 sheets.
• 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets.
• 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly).

Printing Facts

• Average cost of a wasted page $0.06.
• Average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day, that's 1,410 wasted pages per year!
• The average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages per year.
• While 3 out of 4 office workers print from the Internet, 90% of people with a printer at home print Internet content.
• 56% of people ages 45-54 print pages from the Internet for their archives, and only 33% of people ages 18-34 do the same.

Consumption

• In 2004 the United States used 8 million tons of office paper (3.2 billion reams).  That's the equivalent of 178 million trees!
• The U.S. is by far the world's largest producer and consumer of paper.  Per capita U.S. paper consumption is over six times greater than the world average.
• In the United States, we use enough office paper each year to build a 10-foot-high wall that's 6,815 miles long.  That's more than the distance from New York to Tokyo!

Growth

• Global paper products consumption has tripled over the past three decades and is expected to grow by half again before 2010.

Energy

• The U.S. pulp and paper industry is the second largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper uses 11,134 kWh (same amount of energy used by an avg household in 10 months).

Water

• Making one single sheet of copy paper can use over 13oz. of water– more than a typical soda can.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 19,075 gallons of waste water.

Waste

• One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources.
• In 2003, paper and paperboard accounted for 35 percent of the total materials discarded in the United States.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 2,278 lb of solid waste.

CO2

• CO2 prevented if all Fortune 500 companies use GP= 6,311,610 tons
• One hot-air balloon of 10m diameter contains about a ton of hot air - imagine seeing 6,311,610 hot-air balloons floating over the US - that's a lot of balloons!
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 5,690 lb. of greenhouse gases (the equivalent of 6 months of car exhaust).
• Dumping paper in landfill adds methane to the atmosphere as it decomposes, with 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Forests

• In the U.S. we have lost 95 percent of our old growth forests.
• Old growth forests make up 16% of the virgin tree fiber used each year to make paper products.
• 4281 acres of rainforest are lost every hour worldwide.
• It takes 3 tons of wood to produce 1 ton of copy paper.

Ink

• If you were to fill up the tank of your car with Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark ink, it would cost $100,000.
• If you filled an Olympic-size swimming pool with ink it would cost $5.9 billion.

Tree Facts

• A single mature tree can release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support 2 human beings.
• Each person in the U.S. generates approximately 2.3 tons of CO2 each year.
• If every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by one billion lbs annually. This is almost 5% of the amount that human activity pumps into the atmosphere each year.
• According to the USDA Forest Service, a tree generates $31,250 worth of oxygen, provides $62,000 worth of air pollution control, recycles $37,500 worth of water, and controls $31,250 worth of soil erosion, over a 50-year life span.

Comments

[Bryan Wilson]

Great ideas! One thing I try to stress here at our office is using digital technologies to collaborate with before printing. We had the tendency to print off project parts lists, Plans and the like regularly. We would go over these documents, red line them, and then go back to our computers to update the info. Why not pull up the same plans or parts lists on a large format projection screen or interactive whiteboard? The interactive whiteboard allows you to annotate digitally and can save a TON on paper. The only things you ever really need to print might be final revisions, etc... With digital technologies and things like surface computing on the horizon, eliminating paper altogether seems like a great option to work towards...