Green Printing While Cutting Costs
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
Whether you have a single PC at home or run a large business, printing costs are simply too high. The good news is that you can employ these money saving tips to reduce printing costs for your business and/or household. An addtional benefit is that not only will you save money, but you will be reducing the environmental impact at the same time.
Tip 1. Think before you print. Many of us have developed a habit of printing emails and web pages so we can read them later. This can be both costly and wasteful. While you may still want hard copy of legal documents, you certainly don’t need hard copy of most emails or web pages. Instead download a free pdf creator and save that email or web page as a PDF file. In fact, you are still printing the document, but the output is a PDF file to be saved to your computer rather than hard copy. It easy to organize PDF files as you can save them to a folder on your computer or to your desktop for later reference.
Tip 2. Print Only What You Must. How many times have you printed a web page or email and saw that the last page or two was almost blank and had useless information on it, so you tossed it in the garbage. What a waste of paper and ink! GreenPrint has a free software program that let’s you choose what to print and what not to. For the average business with 50 employees, this program will save $4,510 annuallyin reduced paper and ink costs. Also, includes a free PDF Writer (see Tip 1) that let’s you create PDF’s with a single click.
Tip 3. Refill and Recyle Your Printer Cartridges- Instead of buying new cartridges and tossing the old ones into the trash, recycle them instead. While there are plenty of local shops where you can get ink refills, I have heard nothing but great things about EnviroInks.com and their prices are very attractive. I just paid $70 to get my old HP LaserJet 4L’s cartridge refilled and I found the same cartridge and EnviroInks.com for $39.99. They have free shipping on orders of $50 or more and your savings are increased when you return the old printer cartridge to EnviroInks using their pre-paid recycling mailers.
Tip 4. Use Recycled Paper. Okay, this won’t likely save money, but we’ve saved you enough money on reduced paper usage and ink jet and laser toner usage that you can afford to give a little back. When buying paper look to see what percentage of the paper is recycled (may range for 10% to 100%) and what processes they use to recycle the paper. You can find a good selection of recycled paper at GreenLine Paper Company.
Tip 5. Recycle your waste paper. Look at how much paper winds up in land fills:
Any other tips or ideas? Please feel free to comment below.
