Talking About Green

If you do a lot of printing at home, it can get fairly expensive. You’re continually using up your ink and paper supplies, and those items aren’t cheap. Ink especially can be very costly. If you want to save on ink and paper, you have to be very conscious of your printer usage. If it’s difficult or impossible for you to cut back on the number of documents you print, here are some creative ways you can conserve ink and paper and save money.

Font
When you’re printing the documents you create, are you using an ink-friendly font? Avoid printing bold or underlined type whenever possible, for example, and use as small a font size as you can manage. Also, consider purchasing a font that is designed to use 20 percent less ink. It’s called Ecofont, and you can download it at Ecofont.com for as little as $24.95. It can save you approximately $50 per year on ink, and as you continue to use it for years to come, the savings will add up and be more than worth it.

Selective Printing
You could be wasting tons of ink and paper by directly printing websites and emails from the original site. You’ll print the article or picture you want, but you’ll also get everything else on the page including unnecessary ads. Try a website like PrintWhatYouLike.com to help you print more selectively. Just enter a URL, and you’ll be able to easily and quickly delete anything you don’t need before printing. If you need to print an email, consider copying and pasting only the relevant content into a Word document. Then you can even adjust the font style or size, or choose your Ecofont, to save more.

Scrap Paper
A great way to save paper is to keep a collection of scrap paper to use for printing. Consider every paper you no longer need and would otherwise recycle to be potential scrap paper. You may receive a promotional flyer for a community activity, for example, or a non-essential letter from your health insurance company. Any of these papers that do not have double-sided print can be saved as scrap paper. The next time you need to print something where the back of the paper won’t matter, such as a coupon or to-do list, just use paper from your scrap pile.

Old Ink Cartridges
When you’re nearing the end of your ink supply, don’t take your printer’s word for the lack of ink. When your computer notifies you that your supply is running low, remove your ink cartridge, wipe it lightly with a damp paper towel, and replace. This may help the last of the ink flow out. Then, use your cartridges until the very last drop when the text on your documents is no longer visible rather than inserting a new cartridge as soon as you get the warning.  

Double-Sided Printing
You’ll also save twice as much paper if you print double-sided documents rather than let everything have a blank back. If you don’t have a printer that automatically creates double-sided documents, do it manually. It may take a few minutes extra time and be slightly annoying, but by printing documents page-by-page and manually reinserting the paper, you’ll save a great deal.

Terry Ford has lived overseas and found that having a good international wireless phone service is key to stay in touch with your family.  A grammar checker helps her writing be clear and concise.