From Guest Blogger Blake: Six Easy To Follow Green Printing Tips To Save Money — and The Planet

What is green printing?

Simply put, green printing is the collection of practices that will reduce the harm to the environment caused by usual printing practices. If you work in an office environment where printing documents is part of the day-to-day work ritual, you could have already done considerable amount of damage to the environment. However, it is quite easy to reduce the environmental impacts of printing by following green printing techniques and could be implemented instantly. We have listed some easy to implement green printing techniques for offices and homes.

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Double-sided printing

It might be confusing for you to print on both sides of the paper if your printer doesn’t have the feature. Most of the entry-level printers do not have double-sided printing feature. However, if you figure out how you need to place a paper that is already printed on one side to be printed on the other side, you can reduce your paper usage by 50%. If you do not have a printer and wish to buy one soon, make sure that you buy one with double-side printing capability. One can also retrofit their printer with a printer tray to make their printer print on both the sides – this might not be possible with all the printers out there. Also use recycled papers for printing. Recycled paper could be slightly expensive compared to normal paper, but they have lower environmental impact.

Recycle cartridges

To reduce the impact of harmful chemicals in the toner or ink on the environment, we suggest you to properly dispose your ink cartridges to be recycled. In the U.S., 60 to 70% of toner and ink cartridges are threw into trash cans that end up in landfills. It will take 10 centuries for them to completely decompose and could do considerable damage to the environment in the process. Of all the non-recycled cartridges in the world 70% are in the U.S. This doesn’t mean all the other countries are doing a good job at recycling cartridges. Australians alone throws away nearly 18 million cartridges and it is sad that most of them are not sent to be recycled. Nearly 5000 tonnes of printer related wastes end up in landfills in Australia, which includes toner bottles, cartridges, and other printer parts. When they end up in earth, they will pollute the environment and groundwater.

Most printer manufacturers have cartridge recycling programs to help reduce the amount of used cartridges ending up in the ground. Governments are also taking measures to save the environment. For instance, the Australia Post has been aiding the “Planet Ark” program by collecting empty cartridges from thousands of people in the continent. Get to know about a recycling program in your country and take part in it.

Pull printing

It is also known as “FollowMe” printing. In pull printing, the document sent to the printer queue is held by the local server and is released manually by the user when he/she is at the printer. In most offices, people might send something to the printer and might not go collect the papers. Pull printing requires someone to stand next to the machine to trigger the printing process once the file is sent to the queue. This might seem a bit unproductive, but will greatly reduce the number of uncollected paper at the machine. Workers are more likely to print only important documents that they want right away.

Go digital

Use online file sharing services like Google Drive and Dropbox to internally share documents and images in your office. You will not only cut your printing cost by reduce the use of paper and printer ink, you will also be helping the environment. There are some kind of documents that need to be printed. You need to identify what documents do not need and what kind of documents need to be printed. A lot of people will send documents to the print queue without thinking whether they absolutely need a hard copy or not. Educate your employees to change this behavior. More over our brains are accustomed to reading on a digital display. With almost everyone having a smart phone that has the software to view and read all the different kinds of file types, there will not be much difficulty in going digital.

Vegetable-based printer ink

Buy printer ink cartridges that are made using vegetable or soy-based ink opposed to harmful petroleum-based ink. Do check the environmental credentials of the cartridges before buying them. All the top online sellers like Ink Station and BestBuy sell eco-friendly ink cartridges. Although there are a lot of different vegetables used in producing printer ink like, castor, linseed, canola, etc., soy is the most widely used because of its good wetting properties. Although soy oil is edible, soy ink is not completely biodegradable since the additive chemicals and pigments that are used in soy inks are the same as those in petroleum-based inks. If you buy soy ink cartridges and also properly dispose them to be recycled, you can take pride in your actions to save the planet.

Formatting

Try to reduce the use of printer ink and paper by properly formatting the document before printing. Printer ink is pretty expensive. You can greatly reduce your printing cost if you can use fonts that will reduce the consumption of the ink. Try to avoid ink hogs like Impact, Cooper Black and Comic Sans. Some of the most commonly available fonts that are also ink efficient are Garamond, Courier and Times New Roman. You can also reduce the font size to crunch more text in to a page to reduce the use of paper. One should also think twice before printing PowerPoint files since they usually have a lot of graphics, colors and backgrounds with graphics.

If you need to print something from a browser like a web-page or e-mail, make sure to convert it to print-friendly format. Look for a small printer icon on the e-mail so that you can avoid printing all the unwanted content like, advertisements, images and unwanted texts. If the web-page you are trying to print doesn’t provide you a way to convert the page to printer friendly format, you can copy the page to a word processor like MS Word or LibreOffice Writer and format it.

Resources:

http://www.inkstation.com.au/
http://recyclingnearyou.com.au/cartridges/
http://dgs.virginia.gov/OfficeofSurplusPropertyManagement/RecyclingAssistanceProgram/PrinterCartridgeRecyclingInst/tabid/714/Default.aspx