Printing Green in the Office
In my other life, I'm a reporter for a magazine called Sustainable Industries. It's a magazine about, you guessed it, the business of sustainability. I get to learn about and report on tons of cool things, some of which relates to Office Nomads. For instance, in the next issue, I have a story coming out about smart development of dense communities where people are encouraged to live and work in the same neighborhood. Sound familiar? One of the most salient items I learned about is a small piece of software that I hope coworkers (and others) the world over download and try out: GreenPrint.
GreenPrint is a small, free software program that eliminates one of the most annoying and wasteful aspects of doing business in the digital age. It cuts down on the number of unneeded pages that get printed when you need to commit a Web page to paper. You know the problem: You go to print a page from the Web, say a map with directions, and there's that second page with nothing but the URL and a line of text that says "Back to Top." Totally frustrating. GreenPrint gets rid of those pages and allows the user to make a multitude of adjustments to the program to eliminate as many of those pages as possible. It can also provide a preview of all Web pages you want to the pages, trees and pounds of CO2 you've saved. Which will be a lot. Check out these facts from GreenPrint (they have more environmental facts available, if you're interested).
- Average cost of a wasted page $0.062
- Average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day, that's 1,410 wasted pages per year!3
- The average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages per year3
- While 3 out of 4 office workers print from the Internet, 90% of people with a printer at home print Internet content4
- 56% of people ages 45-54 print pages from the Internet for their archives, and only 33% of people ages 18-34 do the same4
So take a a few minutes on this Friday afternoon and download GreenPrint. You won't be sorry you did. And neither will the rest of us!