May 22 2009
5 Reasons to NOT Print
Sustainable Printing means being responsible with our print projects. We need to balance our environmental impact with our needs for printed material in order to save costs and save our planet. Sometimes that means simply not printing. Here are 5 reasons or circumstances where printing is unnecessary.
- Rough drafts – I realize that people like to print rough drafts of documents and make changes by hand before altering the digital file, but it’s not a smart reason to print. Thankfully, a lot of word processing programs like Microsoft Word come with the ability to track changes. That way you can make the changes digitally, but still have record of original verbiage, grammar and punctuation.
- Emails – Almost every email system has a way to save or archive important emails into folders that you can create. Also, you can print your emails to a pdf format and save them on your hard drive. What has helped me plenty of times is to make sure my email program is set to automatically save my sent messages. I have over 2500 sent emails to customers and clients that I can easily search through if need be.
- Bills and Invoices – Whether you are the accounts receivable person at your company or the one paying accounts receivable, see if there’s an option to send payments online and sign up for electronic billing. While not available in every situation, if the opportunity presents itself, then take advantage. With electronic invoices, again, you have the ease and convenience of being able to save old invoices on your computer and never have to worry about losing a hard copy. If the company you work for doesn’t offer this kind of service to its clients, suggest it to the appropriate department or manager. I recently suggested this option to my own boss and am excited to give our customers this option.
- Newsletters – While newsletters are a great way to stay in touch customers, clients, prospects and vendors to keep them up-to-date on your company’s offerings and goals, these can easily be turned into e-newsletters. Electronic newsletters emailed directly to your contact list can greatly decrease the resources needed to print such a document. However, some people still prefer printed newsletters, so give your target audience a choice. Allowing people to sign up for a print versus an electronic copy will give you a better understanding of how to target other marketing efforts. If only 25% of your mailing list prefers hard copy, then other direct marketing efforts (postcards, flyers, etc.) could possibly be revamped to have the majority sent via email. This will save you on printing as well as postage.
- Faxes – I’ve posted before on efax technology that allows users to both send and receive “faxes” electronically. No more wasted cover sheets, confirmation pages or junk faxes. Simply delete the faxes you don’t need and save the others to your computer. This saves not only on paper, but also keeps a fax machine that always has to be on out of the office, which reduces energy usage. If your office has a fax machine, but you’re making the switch to electronic faxing, then make sure you find a place where you can recycle your existing machine.
These are only a few circumstances in which printing can be unnecessary, but there are plenty of others. Take a look around your office and look at what gets printed on a regular basis. Take stock of what is truly needed on paper and what other items can be made electronic. Let me know what you find!
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