Matt’s Cuppa

The company estimates that with widespread use GreenPrint can save 100 million trees and reduce greenhouse gasses by over 30 million tons globally.

I can’t say that I’m that optimistic as to think that people everywhere will begin installing this ad-supported bit of software, but there’s no doubt that it’s a great concept. Don’t print ads. Don’t print unneeded pictures. Save a tree.

Although having your machine set up to do this automatically is pretty cool, it’s not a bad idea to start thinking about taking similar steps ourselves. Here are a few tricks that I’ve learned over the years. This is mostly due to being lazy and cheap and not wanting to go out and buy more toner, but now that I know it helps the planet too, hey, that’s great too!

• Never just hit the "Print" icon. Instead, go into the File -> Print menu, where you can adjust your printing options.
• Reduce your print quality. Most things we print, like directions, can be draft quality, which uses much less toner and prints a million times quicker, too!
• Print things smaller. This uses less paper, less toner, and often gives you room on the page to scratch notes.
• Highlight just the part of the page you want to print and then use the Print Selection option from your print menu.

Ever try to print part of a webpage, perhaps a list or a recipe, and find that the page is full of crazy formatting and prints pages of wasteful useless crap? This last trick may seem a bit extreme, but it’s also one of the most useful. Copy everything that you want to print  and paste everything into Windows Notepad (or some other text editor). Then delete all the tags and markup until you’re left with only the text that you actually want.

Printing from Notepad is usually super fast and super efficient. I often find myself copying text from the web and pasting it into my text editor just to print. What do you do to say money, toner, and trees when you print?