One of the great ways to reduce the number of pages printed unnecessarily … and save a few more trees in the bargain … is to digitize documents.
What often happens is that when we need a hard copy of a document, our real requirement is for just one or a few pages, not the whole document! So start by digitizing any hard copy information that you want to keep for future reference or duplication.
In the typical North American business office it is estimated that the average document is copied 19 times! Frequently the copied sheets are tossed into the waste bin or shredder after the desired information is extracted. When you think about it, this is really a horrendous cost: a burden that our society need not be incurring, and one which our national and global ecology cannot afford indefinitely!
So let’s think about it next time we decide to print copies of a document … first, look through the digital file (or, better still, use a word search engine e.g. Adobe) to locate the precise sentences, paragraphs, dates or numbers that we need to find … and then print out just those pages!
It just may be that we experience a nice encouraging inner personal boost, knowing that we’ve just done something practical and measurable to preserve and improve the world we live in!
