Two easy ways to cut paper waste

Thanks to e-mail and the Internet, we live in an increasingly wasteless, paperless world, right?

Wrong.

Americans, according to a fascinating story in the L.A. Times, use enough sheets every year to build a 10-foot-high wall that would stretch from New York to Tokyo and beyond.

How can you cut back and save money?

First, there’s a “don’t-print plea” movement going on now.

Encouraged by the environmentally friendly Web site, TreeHugger.com, countless businesspeople have been adding a tag at the bottom of every e-mail: “Save Trees. Print only when necessary.”

Even big companies, such as Bovis Lend Lease, a 10,000-person worldwide project management and construction company, are allowing employees to go against rules that previously prohibited personalized e-mail signatures by allowing them to add don’t-print pleas.

I can’t imagine why anyone would add another layer of paper trail to their already cluttered desks, when most e-mail systems have elaborate filing systems and work like searchable databases.

That said, I still print things every day for proofing and for taking with me on assignment. (Yay, Googlemaps!)

That brings me to the second thing you can do to cut paper waste. It comes from the Ideal Bite eco-tip library and it’s pure genius.

If you must print, you can still reduce your overall paper usage by reducing margins in Word documents before printing.

Office workers could save 475 sheets of paper per year by reducing their left, right, top and bottom margins from the default setting of 1 inch to 0.5 inches. An office of 100 could save about $500 on paper per year, according to Ideal Bite.

I went to change my margins and, sure enough, they were set at 1 inch. I printed a test sheet at 0.5 inches and it looked great, still plenty of white space around the edge for visual feng shui.

You’ll find step-by-step instructions here.

It’s fast and easy.

I went into the File menu, then Page Setup, then Margins. I also hit the Default button on the Margins page to apply the change universally, but that seems to apply only to future documents and not the ones I’ve already created. (If you figure out a way to make it apply to all previously created documents, let me know!)

Enjoy!