In a recent episode of Stuff Happens, a new show on Planet Green, host Bill Nye explained how simply reducing the margins on the documents that we print can decrease the amount of paper we use by five percent.
If everyone in the U.S. shrunk their margins from ½ to ¼ inch we would save six million trees. This would prevent ½ million tons of greenhouse gases from being released into the atmosphere. That’s like taking 133,000 cars off road. (Check out the project these kids did; they got similar numbers.)
But it’s not just about trees; paper isn’t cheap. Many schools are looking for ways to cut costs. Here is a five percent savings that can be done with just a few clicks.
You can almost always find the margin settings under File → Page Setup.
Change it in Word:
Change it in Internet Explorer:
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If the “default” font size was 11 instead of 12 we could also fit about 20% more characters on a page.
Great tip! Some other things I do that fall into the same category are:
*copy and paste things from multiple pages to fit them on one.
*change your printing preferences so that you print in “draft” mode or something else that uses less ink for time when you don’t need a professional document
Another great tip! I’m stopping by more often. Will change my classroom printer default tomorrow and start my little green effort. 🙂
Forgot — something I try to teach my students to do also is when they want just a portion of the web page’s text, to highlight it with their mouse, go to File, Print, but choose to “Print selection” instead of plain ol’ “print”. If the print job is a few pages long, you could combine this with the reduced font size and increased margin tips and get more text with less paper, as well.