July 16th, 2008 No Comments

Save a tree and some money

It seems like every time I print a Web page or e-mail message the last page off the printer is mostly blank. Sometimes it just has an ad that I don’t need, or the last part of a privacy notice from an e-mail, or even just a page number. These extra pages get thrown away by the millions every day, wasting paper, toner, ink, time and money.

A company called GreenPrint Technologies has come up with a clever solution, at least for Windows computers. They have created a simple print driver that can be installed on any Windows machine. After that, whenever you print something you will first see a preview of the document, and the Green Print software has automatically highlighted those pages that it believes to be junk. It takes just a click to block one or more pages before it ever hits your printer.

The software is really easy to use. It lets you configure the type of pages it should block, for example blocking pages that only contain a single graphic, or blocking pages that only have a footer. It even keeps track of your savings over time. And there is a PDF feature so you can decide to create a PDF file instead of sending the document to your printer.

There are free (for home use) as well as paid (for business/commercial use) versions of Green Print. Install the software today and start doing your share to eliminate this micro-waste.

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