25 March 2008

Innovation: Printing Green from Blogs and Docs

Fred Wilson pointed me to this new widget I've just added to my blog (see bottom of right sidebar) that will help you print or email pages from The Green Skeptic in a way that will save paper. Of course, not printing it at all will save even more.

As Fred described it in his post today: "It's called the ECO-SAFE merit badge. But I call it my blog printing widget. From it, you can email this page, email a pdf of this page, or download a pdf of this page. It's goal is to reduce the amount of paper that is wasted printing blogs."

Find out more at: ECO-SAFE.com

For the past few months I've also been beta-testing a program called GreenPrint World that allows you to reduce the number of pages you print when printing documents. It scans the pages before sending them to your printer and highlights extraneous pages or pages with very little print suggesting you may want to remove them from the print job. It also creates PDFs with one click.

The extra step is a bit annoying when trying to print that document on the fly between meetings, but I've already saved 103 pages or $10.40 since installing the program. And having a few extra clicks to make before printing has definitely made me more conscious of what I am printing.

(I do wish GreenPrint World allowed you to reduce the size of the document with one click like you can in Microsoft Word's "Print Preview" function. That would help save that widow on the last page so she doesn't take up an entire sheet of paper!)

Find out more about GreenPrint World and download the latest version of the program at: printgreener.com