Untitled Document

Ideas take 'one-half inch' concept a step further

An old riddle asks, how do you eat an elephant? Answer, one bite at a time. The same applies to environmental stewardship – conserve natural resources one person or one paper at a time.

Matt Moore, Administrator of the Division of Transportation Planning and Programming, recently received a tip for reducing paper consumption – simply expand the margins by one-half inch on both sides of a document.

Several ITD employees, in response to the Feb. 1 Transporter article, suggested taking the concept a couple of additional steps.

Len Baxter:
If employees would perform a "print preview" before printing and make sure the document will print like they want it (portrait vs. landscape) we would save even more paper. A lot more paper.

Carrie Warner
IT Information Systems Tech, Sr.:
I'm not sure who may be interested in this but my comment pertaining to "Save the earth" article is that we should all be "duplexing" our printed documents through the printers. Most of ITD should have this capability in existing printers. Not only does it cut paper usage in half but is saves space for filing records too.

Patrick Lawson
District 3 - R3 intern:
I just read the printing tips article on reducing margins to save paper. Makes a ton of sense. You (or whoever writes the articles) might also mention in the future that many of the newer laser printers have a duplex feature so you can print on both sides of the paper automatically.

Especially if you are printing out draft copies of something to review, etc, duplexing can save a lot of paper. One other feature that most printers have, even if they don't duplex, is printing multiple pages per sheet. So, on one sheet of paper, if you turn it to landscape, it will reduce your page and print two pages onto one page.

This one does have limitations if people have trouble reading smaller text, but again it's a great paper saver. If you couple this feature with duplexing you can print four legible pages on one sheet of paper. It's just a matter of looking at the printer properties before you hit OK and send it to the printer.

As an example, recently at home, I printed off a 23-page document, but printed two pages per sheet (with the sheet in landscape) and printed on both sides of the paper. So instead of 23 sheets of paper, I only used six sheets.

Mike Cram:
Why not reduce the font size as well? Just another way to save paper.

Double sided printing? Make multiple copies on the copy machine instead of the printer. Printing is about twice the paper/ink cost of photocopying (generally).

We are limited only by our creativity.

- - - - -

Do you have other ideas for reducing ITD’s impact on the environment? Please contact any member of the ITD Greenhouse Gas Committee (coordinated by Patti Raino), or send suggestions to the Transporter. We’ll be happy to pass them along.