Sustainable Printing

Here at Sustainable Printing, my goal is to educate and inform my readers on smart choices they can make with their printing to reduce the effects that has on the environment.  To implement green printing practices at your home or office, I encourage using recycled papers, being responsible with choosing what to print and of course recycling bad or old prints.  Before you toss your paper in the recycling bin, take a look at the following 5 ways to get more use out of your paper.

1)    If only one side has been printed on, reuse it in the printer or fax machine for other single-sided printing.  This works especially well in fax machines (if you still have one) for confirmation pages.

2)    Again, if only one side has been printed on, collect in a box until there’s a substantial stack.  Take it to a local print shop and have the printer cut and glue the paper into notepads for around the office.  The company I work for has done this many times both for our customers and for ourselves.  Even if you do have some printing on the second side, but the ink is not on the majority of the sheet, your printer can cut around the areas that wouldn’t work as scratch paper.  Creating notepads is a cost-effective solution to reuse some paper that would normally not get used a second time.

3)    Shred it.  If your company ships packages even semi-frequently, use the shredded paper as filler.  This works with all kinds of paper, even the hard to recycle neon papers.

4)    Practice Origami.  So this is a little outside the box, but you could hold contests for employees and coworkers to create a little friendly competition and unity in the workplace.

5)    Donate it.  If your prints are single-sided and in good shape, find a local school or non-profit organization that can use it.  This helps those organizations that are on strict budget constraints reduce their paper costs.

Of course, after you take your paper for a second or third spin around the block, be sure to recycle it!  What other creative ways have you or your company reused paper?

Photo Credit: Flickr user mhaw

Related Post: 5 Ways to Reduce your Printing Costs

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