Ted Walker – UITS Communications Office

The Indiana University Bloomington community prints over 28 million paper pages each school year. Laid end-to-end, these pages could travel to the moon and back with miles to spare.

Do we need to print as many pages as we do? In answering that question, the Print Less, Go Green campaign at IU encourages you to look carefully at the printing that you do, and to find ways that you can reduce the number of pages that you print.

One of the best things you can do to print less is cut down on your unwanted printing jobs. In the IU Bloomington Student Technology Centers, as much as 15% of printing jobs are unwanted pages left behind. Use the print preview function before sending your work to the printer. This will help you to cut down on blank and unwanted pages, like the unnecessary content at the bottom of web pages and emails.

Another strategy is to use electronic resources in place of paper printing. Check to see if you can submit your class papers and projects electronically. Also, you can read E-Reserves online instead of printing them out and download electronic documents to your laptop or PDA and read them on the move even when you don’t have an Internet connection. For more about E-Reserves, visit:

http://kb.iu.edu/data/aqfz.html

Also, with the new Adobe suite available on iuware.iu.edu, you don’t need to print out a document to add your own notes. Adobe Acrobat reader allows you to download PDF files and insert and save your notes and comments directly. To archive your digital documents, you can use electronic storage functions like My Workspace in Oncourse CL, a USB flash drive, or a DVD.

Here are a few more tips to reduce the number of pages you print:

• To avoid unnecessary duplicates, be patient when sending print jobs to Student Technology Center (STC) printers. If your job is delayed, don’t re-send it — instead report the problem to an on- or off-site STC consultant.

• To save paper and dollars spent on printing, use smaller margins — instead of 1.25″ margins, opt for 1″ margins.

For the complete list of Print Less, Go Green tips, visit:

http://kb.iu.edu/data/aqez.html