Grasshopper New Media Presents...

I caught this tip on NPR this week and really loved it. By simply changing the margins on each document you print you can save a significant amount t of paper and therefore tress each year. Consider this:

“Each person in an office on average uses 2.5 pounds of paper each week. In the U.S., a ton = 2000 pounds, so that means every 2 years and 70 days, each person in an office on average uses a ton of paper.

(since) It takes 17 pulpwood market-sized trees and 390 gallons of oil to make a ton of paper….”

In other words: Each office worker is responsible for the loss of 8 or 9 trees per year. The NPR story focused on changing your margins from the standard 1.25 setting to .75 on every document you print. Since I already do this, more to save on expensive ink than for more altruistic reasons, I was happy to see I could save trees too!

But wait, there’s more.

In a paper linked to the site I found the following comparison

Check my math here… by making these changes, theoretically, rather than using 2000 pounds of paper or 500,000 sheets every 800 days ( 2 years 70 days), one would only use 75,000 sheets or 375 pounds of paper or about 1/6th as much paper in that time.

In simpler terms, you’d use 75,000 sheets of paper rather than 500,000 sheets, using 2.6 trees every two years or so versus 17 trees. Not too bad a savings! I think I’ll start now!

[tags]a little greener, ecology, environmental, caring, trees, paper, petroleum, increase print margins [/tags]
Photo graciously provided by josef.stuefer, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved