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Environment

Printing Tips To Reduce Environmental Impact

Posted: 6/9/2010

If you’re serious about protecting the environment, you must address the amount you print.

(NAPSA) - Paper consumption can account for a vast majority of the total carbon footprint of a printing device, making it the largest contributor above other factors such as energy consumption and manufacturing.

So for those small business and home office owners who really want to minimize the environmental impact of printing, just looking at “green” products or products that are “eco-engineered” is not enough. Even looking at the energy efficiency of the device isn’t enough, since the amount of watts consumed by printing devices are all pretty much the same.

In fact, it takes up to 60 times more electrical energy to manufacture one sheet of paper than it does for a laser printer to print on it.

So how do you print less? How do you effectively reduce the volume of pages flowing through the devices deployed throughout your organization?

Try these tips:

• Think before you print. Whether at home or at work, just take a moment to print smarter. Review all documents from the computer and only print final versions when necessary. Share soft (electronic) copies of documents when possible. Also, reduce your margins in text documents to get more content onto each page, therefore reducing the total number of pages used.
  
  
• Print on both sides of the paper. Check to see if your printer offers a duplex or two-sided printing option. This automatically cuts the amount of paper being used and therefore your cost of paper supplies is reduced by up to 50 percent.
  
  
• Print text only (or print in draft mode) to reduce the amount of ink used.
  
  
• Use high-yield cartridges to reduce your cost per page.
  
  
• Share printers in the home or office through wireless networking technology.
  
  
• Recycle your printed pages and use paper with recycled content. If you print on one side only, save those pages in a designated spot and use again on the blank side. Use a designated blue box for this, placing the side with text face down to make reuse easier.
  
  
• Look for electronics with a longer warranty, such as Lexmark’s Professional Series inkjet products, which offer an industryleading, five-year warranty to extend the life cycles of your devices.
  
  
• Join a supply rewards program. Supply programs reduce your costs and reward you for purchasing and recycling original cartridges. For full program details, visit www.lexmarkrewards.com.
  
  
• When the printer’s life cycle is complete, return the printer to a dedicated collection point for recycling.
  
  
• Reduce energy usage by switching the device off after use.
  
  
• Choose a multifunction de - vice that allows you to scan a document into a digital format for storage on shared folders, archiving or sending through e-mail

More information can be found online at www.lexmark.com.

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