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Paper Cut Featured on May 30, 2008
Challenge
Are you an office printaholic? This month, make it your goal to print less. Cut paper consumption by 25%. We'll show you how.
Individual Result
Reduce your printing a little per day, or go cold-turkey for 5 days to reduce monthly CO2 by 7.6 lbs.
Rally Impact
1520 people have reduced CO2 emissions by 5.48 tons by completing this challenge so far. That's equal to turning off the electricity of 5 homes for about 1 month!
Challenge Details
Sometimes you just need to print something. Take me, for instance. I’m a writer. And even though I write, edit, and submit articles via computer, there are times when I feel a deep, primal need to print out something I’m writing. That paper comes out of the laser printer all warm and crisp. You can touch it. You can hold it. You can shake it at somebody or fold it into an airplane. It’s real. Sigh. I’m Andrew. And I’m a printoholic.
This Featured Challenge comes from our Challenge Workshop and was suggested by Carbon Clique. This suggestion has received a whopping 38 positive votes to date. Clearly this is an idea long overdue in becoming a Challenge! Thanks, CC! And kudos to Alex for the related suggestion of switching to recycled paper for printing.
The Carbon Connection
According to a Worldwatch Institute report, the United States consumes 30 percent of the world’s paper. Of that paper, about one third is used for writing (pads or stationery) or for printing (office/home printers and copiers). From 1980 to 2000, the consumption of this high-quality paper increased at a much greater rate than that of newsprint or cardboard. Clearly there is no such thing as a paperless office.
Manufacturing paper requires energy. That paper starts as a tree. The tree gets harvested, transported some distance to a plant to get sliced up into chips. Those wood chips are then transported to a pulp mill, which can be thousands of miles away. At the pulp mill, the wood chips are ground into pulp, which gets bleached and washed and sent to the paper mill to be made into paper. Eventually, the paper is cut into the right size sheets for your laser printer, packaged, and then shipped — again, maybe thousands of miles — to your local office store.
Why the lesson on paper production? Well, everyone needs to think about the lifecycle of the products they use. Manufactured goods are made from raw materials that take energy to acquire. Each step in the manufacturing process takes energy and so does transporting goods from the factory to stores and then to your office or home. That energy most likely comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere. That’s why the more paper you use, the more carbon dioxide gets produced.
Getting It Done
Need help meeting this Challenge? Here are a few simple suggestions:
- Start with trying to reduce the number of things you print or photocopy. Think twice before you hit that print button. Is there a good reason to print this? Is there a better way to print this?
- If you are printing a document to review, edit, or make comments, make them on-screen instead. You can do this with the “Track changes” and “Insert comments” features in Microsoft Word. Speaking of Word, another way to get more words on a page (and therefore use less paper when you finally print) is to decrease your font size and change Word’s “generous” default margins so that there isn’t as much white space surrounding your text.
- If you have to print, take charge. Tell your printer to print on both sides of the paper. Not all laser printers can do this; ink jet printers can’t do it at all. Check to see if your printer has a two-side printing (often called “Duplex”) option. If your eyes are good and you don’t mind small type, you could also try “two-up” printing where the printer prints two reduced pages on one side of a sheet. Finally, some printers have a booklet setting which prints two-up pages on both sides of the paper, effectively giving you four pages on one sheet of paper — a 75% reduction!
- Use the print preview so you don’t get surprises or print blank pages. And only print the pages you need from a long report, not the entire report.
- Don’t print out emails to archive if you have an option to store old emails in an electronic archive. For example, there’s software available that can turn your old email folders into HTML pages suitable for burning to a CD.
- Reuse the paper if you can. Keep a stack of old one-sided printouts nearby for when you need to scrap paper to take notes or doodle. Once you’ve used both sides of the paper, then you can recycle it.
- Not all paper is the same. More and more, you should be able to find inexpensive printer and copier paper that contains pulp from recycled paper, often referred to as post-consumer or recycled content. The more post-consumer fiber used in paper, the less carbon dioxide is released in the paper’s manufacture. Reducing the amount of paper you use is the best place to start. But you can reduce your carbon dioxide emissions even more by increasing your use of paper with post-consumer fiber. Start with a minimum of 30% recycled material and see how it goes.
Do you have other ways of taming your office’s paper tiger? Scribble them down on a scrap piece of paper and then share your stories with your fellow Rallyers in the Challenge Discussion section below.
Rules of the Challenge
This Challenge is aimed at our office and small business Rallyers. Typically, offices are the biggest users of paper. An average of your use with that of a student or a small family wouldn’t be meaningful. (And honestly, we currently don’t have estimates for paper usage by these other groups.) We will try to get a version of this Challenge written and published that works for our non-office members.
This Challenge asks you reduce your use of paper for printing or photocopying by 25% for one month. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Don’t print anything at all for five work days this month. Print or copy on both sides of the paper whenever you can. Decide not to print emails unless absolutely necessary. Proofread your papers on the computer and not on paper. By cutting back on your use of paper, you will reduce your CO2 emissions by 7.6 lbs for the month. This Challenge lasts for one month and is repeatable.
Learn More
Rutgers: The Paper Challenge
Greening the Workplace
Information on Recycling Paper
Go Green: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Paper
See the Math
Let’s look at what we do know. Here are our known or estimated numbers and assumptions:
- According to the Worldwatch Institute report above, the average American office worker uses 12,000 sheets of paper per year or 1000 sheets per month. A package of paper is called a ream and has 500 sheets of paper. So, the average office worker is using 2 reams of paper each month. Not all of that paper use is under your control. You can only affect your own printing and copying behavior. So we’re going to cut that number in half and assign an average paper use of 1 ream per month to everybody.
- Not all paper is the same. More and more, paper is being sold that contains recycled paper, often referred to as post-consumer fiber. The more post-consumer fiber used in paper, the less carbon dioxide is released in the paper’s manufacture. Paper that has no post-consumer fiber (100% virgin paper) is responsible for 7.1 pounds of CO2 being released for every pound of paper produced. Paper with 33% post-consumer fiber is 6.1 pounds of CO2 released per pound of paper and 50% post-consumer fiber is 5.5 pounds. We are going to assume that you are using paper with some post-consumer fiber and go with the 6.1 pounds CO2 per pound of paper number.
- One ream of typical multi-purpose copy paper, suitable for laser printers or copy machines, weighs very close to 5 pounds.
Now put all that together to get the following equation:
- Therefore, each ream of copy paper used is responsible for 30.5 pounds of released CO2. Reduce your use of paper by just one quarter this month and save 7.6 pounds of CO2 (30.5 pounds of CO2 divided by 4).
Remember, recycling your office paper is good. But reducing the amount of paper you use to begin with is even better. (And yes, that does mean you can’t make a paper airplane out of any sheet that hasn’t been used on both sides.) You’ll save money, reduce carbon — and maybe even prevent a nasty papercut or two. Do Rallyers bleed green?
Discuss Paper Cut:
This is a tough challenge for me but one I really want to meet. My immediate response was to want to print out the information about the challenge with all of the tips. I resisted. :-) I can read it online anytime I want! I find that most of the things I print are available electronically so I don’t really need to print them. I have a friend that used a signature line on her emails that I really like. It says “Please consider the environment before printing this email.” I’m going to add that to my email signature.
I have stopped printing tickets/emails from all clients and fellow employees.
I started typing the names,companies & whatnot of the people I’m trans- ferring in notepad, then erasing it after i;m done w/the info, instead of what i would normally do: scribble onto a pc. of paper on my desk
Crow: Please get a team going with these guys!
At work we use so much paper it’s pathetic! Everyone at Regal Entertainment Group is always saying, “Go Green!” in their e-mails, and yet no one is doing it because they print everything out and throw it away when they don’t need it.
Last week I got a bin for us to put paper in and I began taking it down to a recycling center near my house. I also don’t print things out needlessly. I’m going to have the other managers actually going green in no time.
I read the printer tipes and thought: This is great! I’ll print out a copy for my mom!” But I didn’t. I’m getting better!
I would print everyday of stuff I actually didn’t need. That I would throw away the next day. So now that I told my mom that we should sell our printer and disconnect it. I’ve stopped so far! (:
I use a Mac, and I have the option on the print page of saving a document in pdf form instead of printing. I can do this when I need to save an online receipt or confirmation, and then delete the file later when I don’t need it any more.
In my office, everyone is very “printer-contious” meaning everyone watches how much we print. In the computer industry, it is hard at times but we know it helps the environment and it helps us save money-win, win!!!
I didn’t think I could make it through 28 days of this challenge but I did! I’m embarrassed, though, at how much unnecessary printing I did previously. One thing I’ve started doing is making a screen print of receipts that I often printed out to document monetary transactions. By pasting the screenprint in a document and saving it, I can always go back to it for verification and I can email it to Accounting without it ever having to be printed out. ALSO I LOVE K8te Lynn’s tag at the bottom of her email signature. I’m going to add it to mine today! Great idea.
I have added the following to my email signature:
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail
This challenge is an awsome one. Unfortunatley when school starts back up this challenge is going to be super difficult. One of my old teachers had us print almost everything we did to “see our progress.” I can see my progress without printing!
I have some awesome professors that let me e-mail my assignments to them. That takes my printing to almost nothing. :D
I used to be terrible about printing out reams of articles to read while I was traveling for business(www.greenhomeguru.net). I began to get sick of printing out all the articles, reports, etc… and then throw them away after a read. A month ago, I began to save articles onto my flash drive and read them on my computer. What a break for everything in the process. Less paper, less luggage, less garbage.
I work in a shop and have to photo copy work sheets every day, to cut down I can make copys for thhe month.
Check out Green Print http://www.printgreener.com/
This software lets you preview what you print and cut out what you don’t want. Need to print your boarding pass, but don’t need all the rules and regulations the airlines include? Use Green Print to get rid of the extra stuff. It also lets you print to PDF. Which saves paper and makes receipts easier to find. Best of all the software is free for home use.
I can’t accept this challenge It took me 8 years to use a ream of paper! When I worked in an office I printed maybe once a month and tried to get people to print less to no avail. Attempts to make people use puters for document managment and avoid printing to minimize paper was near impossible. And getting people to print 600 page reports to files and view on a second monitor was met with mass resisitance! I use one notebook a year for college. I submit all my work on PC. I use spiral bound notebooks for everything and I use both sides of a sheet of paper until I just can’t fit anything on it.
I LOVE this challenge! I am a NON-Printholic. Here are the things I do to help reduce our paper output in my office: *First, print on both sides of the page if at all possible. Better yet, for those loooong Pdf documents, print in booklet mode and reduce paperx4. *Email info as much as possible rather than faxing or snail mailing. *If you have an old time fax like me and can only fax from one side of the paper, print faxes on the back of something else…a previous fax for instance, or how about those completely wasted sheets that come out confirming your fax went through. Flip it over and print it on the back! *Any paper that does not have to go out to a client or w/b used only once, for a fax, goes back in a pile near my printer and I use it to print out other one-use papers. *If you send faxes to the same people over and over, Make up a generic fax cover page (on the back of something else of coures) with their name and fax#, leave the date, number of pages and info section blank. Hand write in that info in pencil and save the fax cover page. Erase and re-write the next time you need to send them something. *For info that simply MUST be sent via snail mail, always print double sided when possible. I also made a word document w/ a small note basically requesting clients to provide us w/ email in order to cut costs and save the planet. Four of these notes w/ fit on one page. I cut out the strips and staple one to the top of every snail mail that goes out. Slowly but surely I’m gathering more emails! *Any paper used in the office for any reason gets shredded. All those beautiful shreds go right into the recycling bin to become more wonderful paper!
I work in a chiropractic office and to keep patients straight, who is in which room, we have used routing slips that we either pay someone to print out, or we print out ourselves. This was always such a waste in my eyes because no on ever used these routing slips to communicate with the Dr. like they were wanted to. With an idea from our exam Doc, we switched from pieces of paper and clip boards, to little 5×7 dry erase boards. No more wasted paper, no more wasted ink, and much less energy output from our printer or someone else’s!
this is easy to do considering my lap top is not on the network!
OK, this one will be a bit harder for me. I already don’t print very much anyway, but am guilty of printing things soemtimes I know I wont keep for the convenience of reading it offline on paper instead of on a screen. So this one will have some results Im sure.
when we’re back in school, i will most definitely share this with my teachers and i’m sharing it with my friends now!
I asked my fellow teachers to send over any unused worksheets, student papers, etc. at the end of this school year. I sorted papers by whether they were already two sided or only one-sided. I gained 45 reams of paper that I will copy onto the blank side (8th graders don’t care about the backs) and 18 reams of waste paper to be recycled. I will ask for this type of paper throughout this coming school year as well as reduce my own copying load.
Hah, I’ve barely been printing since day 1 XD This should be a piece of cake :)
I don’t print much as it is, so I will try cold-turkey for the rest of June and see how I can extend it.
when i do print things now ist on both sides of the paper it helps you keep things in order and helps me from losing one paper and saves TONS of paper.
light says that he composts his kitchen scraps and its easy and great for the garden not to mention the earth
I think 2-sided printing whenever possible and proofing on the computer thoroughly will have the biggest impact for me at the office. One other thing I can do (won’t cut 25% but it will help) is to count EXACTLY how many copies I need of things I print out in bulk. For example, we have about 200 stores that I send things to regularly. Instead of printing 205 of everything and having some left over, I’ll count the exact number of existing stores needing the materials and print out the exact amount I need. Leftovers like this are always waste. Yikes! This is a real challenge for me!
Instead of printing sales receipts, forms, invoices, etc. I print them to a PDF file. It makes keeping organized much easier for tax purposes as well as saves tons of paper while keeping the original formatting!
If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can use PrimoPDF, a FREE to use/download software for Printing To PDF: http://www.primopdf.com/
For more advanced use, I recommend and use a software called “Fineprint” to save even more paper: http://www.fineprint.com/
when i print things like essays for school, i make the margins as small as i can and decrease the font size so i can fit twice as many words on one page.
I live in a family of seven people four of us use the computer and only three of us print things out. I am the youngest person that prints things out and I do it alot. I print things like pictures and home work and every once in a while song lyrics. The thing is my family only uses about three reams of paper a year and not all of it is used to print. WE have three little kids that like to draw and sometimes we use the copy paper to write important things down so we dont have to print.
My favorite printing trick is to change the print quality to “Fast Draft.” Not only does it save ink, it saves me money and less trash goes into the the landfills.
My office has a way to differentiate employee prints.I mean Whenever an employee shoots a print along with his documents the printer prints an additional sheet with his/her name on it (since the printer is in a network).Though its a good way for identification of whose print it was ,I really want to propose something that would eliminate using this sheet.Any suggestions appreciated.
I’ve learned how to email things directly to my mobile phone. Now, rather than printing directions and shopping lists, I just read them on my phone when I am away from my computer. Many phones support basic email. Give it a try.
I print so much for school and our printer is constantly going through paper. Its time for a change
today i took a packet with the summer reading books and descriptions (29 pages) and put it down to one page front and back i made the margins wider and shrunk the font and it is still readable and i saved 28 sheets of paper
My school has recycle bins in every single room there is. There’s also plastic recycling tubs and aluminum can ones. pha.
I work for a law firm and we use ALOT of paper. I’ve been recycling for years, using 2-sided printing and wider margins, etc. – but I am the exception at the firm. The company started an Environmental Working Group last year to make our employees more aware of many environmentally positive steps we can all take – it’s slow going but we have made progress.
My moms office gets a box of paper with 10 reams in it and they go through that in a week tops, it is a welfare department but still. I think if the people who need welfare tried to better their lives than just using it to help them there would be less paper usage. This challenge is easy for me because I hardly print things out because I like writing more. At my school the teachers are limited as to the amount they can use but still it’s pointless because half of the students don’t use what they print out. Hopefully something good will help change that.
At my school, we have recycling bins in every classroom, and a special paper dumpster used just for paper recycling. However, we don’t recycle anything else, but we’re working on it!
My school doesn’t send report cards home anymore, now they’re only online and are e-mailed to parents. Since there are 1,600 students, that’s a pretty big reduction. We have recycling bins in every classroom. We’re still working on being eco-friendly though. We don’t have solar panels yet…
Hi All: Please keep in mind that this challenge is targeting people who currently do a lot of printing. Like all challenges in Carbonrally, accepting it means that you are making a real change in your behavior to reduce your CO2 emissions. If you don’t print too much, this challenge probably isn’t right for you… instead, go find a printaholic, and convince them to take this challenge! thx.
I Rarely print anyways. this challenge is easy for me. i print about 5 sheets a month tops. :]
At school our teacher hands a few pieces of lined paper everyday to take different sets of notes on and we never even fill the whole page before we get a new one the next day! I am going to start turning down the offer for the new piece and finish off what i have left on the page from the day before!
i worked in a lab and we are printing protocols and graphs to post in our notebooks everyday which isn’t a good way of saving our trees. This is one good challenge for me. Hopefully I can reduce the amount of prints for the next month.
Students and office workers who usually take notes on a spiral notebook can save time & paper by using Microsoft OneNote – a program specifically designed for note-taking. It’s typically included if you have Microsoft Office on your PC but most people overlook it as it’s a fairly new product.
Our school recently had an assembly on our carbon footprint and how we can reduce it, and I was shocked at the amount of paper we use each year. Between photo-copying hand outs and printing off assignments, any school’s carbon footprint is pretty huge. Now we have recycling bins for paper in every classroom and we have contests to see who can recycle the most paper each month. Teachers have also started sending out what our assignments will be instead of printing us each off a copy. This challenge is great and we could really do some damage on the Earth-in a good way!-if we take this on.
I’ve begun saving old paper and re-printing on the other side. I’m taking internet classes for college and I print all of my documents on BOTH sides of the paper, and I don’t even print at all if I don’t have to! I’ve bought a jump-drive so I can go from computer to computer and I have all my information right there!
Thank you for taking my challenge! Enjoy saving trees!
Students can save paper by asking their teachers/professors to accept electronic copies of their work instead of hard copies. I saved at least a ream of paper doing that last school year.
I’ve been using two screens to work. Although I use a little more electricity I find that I print approximately 40% less over previous months. Comparing documents is much easier also because my eyes aren’t going up/down all day. Try it! Make sure your monitors are matched (Resolution and close to the same size)and are Energy Star compliant.
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