Reduce Printer and Paper Use

See all the wasted white space in this standard text document?

The average office worker uses more than 150 pounds of recyclable paper each year and only 48% of this paper is recycled! Every person has an impact. Here are some things you can do to reduce your waste:

• Double-sided copying and printing: Double-side readers reports, and documents to save paper and money.
• Don't Print: Use pdf or electronic forms of communications
• Buy in bulk: This reduces waste that accumulates from packaging and delivery.
• Decrease margins: By reducing margins you can fit more content onto a single page.

At first, I was not convinced that reducing printing margins would help, and to prevent you from suffering from the same lapse in logic , let us discuss printer margins in greater depth.

Printer Margins

In October 2001, a research team of the Penn State Green Destiny Council released a report on the ecological analysis of Mueller Laboratory (pdf), a biology building on the Penn State University Park campus. This policy paper, derived from the report, showed how PSU could save 72 acres of forest and over $120,000/year by reducing the default margin settings campus wide.

It may seem like reducing printing margins would have a minimal effect on your paper use, but it does make a difference.

Still not convinced? Think of it this way: most text editors give a one inch margin on every side of your document, and for simplicity, let us just analyze the left and right margins.

A sheet of standard letter paper is about 8 inches wide, and so every document printed has 2 one-inch columns of white space. When you print the 4th document, you would have printed about 8 one-inch columns of white space—-which is about a blank sheet of paper!

Ok, so maybe you want to keep the left margins because you want to hole-punch the documents, but above analyses equally applies to the top, left, and bottom margins!

Change The Margins Campaign

Visit www.changethemargins.com to learn more about the "margin movement," read more information about the effect of changing printing margins on the environment and petition key companies to change their default margins.

How to Change your Margins

It should take no more than twenty seconds and just a few clicks of the mouse. I suggest setting your margins to .50-.75", which will save an immense amount of paper over the long haul, but still leaves you with a little bit of space on the sides. For those of you on the metric system, I'd recommend setting your margins to 2 centimeters, which is just over .75".

• ON PCs:
  • On your WORD screen, go to FILE, then PAGE SET UP.
  • Click on the MARGINS tab, and fill in your desired settings.
  • Then click on the DEFAULT button (it's on the bottom of the Margins tab). You'll be offered "Do you want to change the default settings for the page set up? This change will affect all new documents based on the normal template." Click YES.
• ON MACs:
  • On your WORD screen, go to FORMAT, then DOCUMENT.
  • Once on DOCUMENT, click on MARGINS and you'll be able to fill in the settings for your margins.