Don’t Print

Paper, paper, paper and more paper – despite constant advances in technology, social networking and methods of distribution we still print e-mails, web pages, blog posts and topics we find on the web – why?

I’m as guilty as anyone else. I regularly print out articles written by my favourite columnists, I print stories so I can read them later and print emails to keep that I end up throwing away in a week.

The amount of paper I waste is incredible. OK so I make myself feel a bit better by letting my kids use it to scribble on after I’ve read what was on it – but it would have been better not to print it in the first place.

I’ve printed 100 page white papers that end up in the bin when I do my next clean-up and more often than not I haven’t even looked beyond the cover sheet.

So I’m saying no more. From now on I’ll use one of the MANY bookmarking sites on the web to save a story (or copy it into word and save it on my hard drive) if I can’t read it now and if I can read it now I’ll just read it instead of printing to read.

E-mails are automatically saved anywhere so no need to print them.

I’m also going to actively encourage other people to do the same with a little line in my e-mail, small banner on my blog and in forums as well as just saying it.

So here you go – use the image if you like, put the text in your signatures if you want, I’ll even re-create a version of the graphic to suit your needs.

“Please don’t print this unless you REALLY need to”