I found out about this program a while ago and really thinks its an easy solution to cut down on wasted paper and save you money by using less ink.

The program is called GreenPrint. Once installed on your computer it will analyze everything that you want to print and remove pages that have very little text on them. I mean how many times have you printed mapquest directions and have gotten that last page with just the URL at the top.

Here is a link to a demo to showing how the program works. Demo

GreenPrint states:

• The average user will save about $90 a year in paper and ink.

• If all US households with a computer used GreenPrint over $6 billion would be saved a year.

• If all new computers used GreenPrint greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by over 117 million tons. That’s the equivalent of removing 23 million cars from the road for an entire year.

• If all new computers sold in 2006 used green print over 36 million trees would be saved every year.

Here are some of environmental impacts of the paper and printing industry from their website just to put things into perspective.

Paper Facts

• 1 ton of paper = 400 reams = 200,000 sheets
• 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets
• 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly)

Printing Facts

• Average cost of a wasted page $0.06
• Average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day, that’s 1,410 wasted pages per year!
• The average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages per year

Consumption

• In 2004 the United States used 8 million tons of office paper (3.2 billion reams). That’s the equivalent of 178 million trees!
• The U.S. is by far the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper. Per capita U.S. paper consumption is over six times greater than the world average.
• In the United States, we use enough office paper each year to build a 10-foot-high wall that’s 6,815 miles long. That’s more than the distance from New York to Tokyo!

Growth

• Global paper products consumption has tripled over the past three decades and is expected to grow by half again before 2010.

Energy

• The U.S. pulp and paper industry is the second largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper uses 11,134 kWh (same amount of energy used by an avg household in 10 months)

Water

• Making one single sheet of copy paper can use over 13oz. of water– more than a typical soda can.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 19,075 gallons of waste water

Waste

• One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources.
• In 2003, paper and paperboard accounted for 35 percent of the total materials discarded in the United States.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 2,278 lb of solid waste

CO2

• CO2 prevented if all Fortune 500 companies use GP= 6,311,610 tons
• One hot-air balloon of 10m diameter contains about a ton of hot air - imagine seeing 6,311,610 hot-air balloons floating over the US - that’s a lot of balloons!
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 5,690 lb. of green house gases (the equivalent of 6months of car exhaust).
• Dumping paper in landfill adds methane to the atmosphere as it decomposes, with 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Forests

• In the U.S. we have lost 95 percent of our old growth forests.
• Old growth forests make up 16% of the virgin tree fiber used each year to make paper products.
• 4281 acres of rainforest are lost every hour worldwide
• It takes 3 tons of wood to produce 1 ton of copy paper.

Ink

• If you were to fill up the tank of your car with Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark ink, it would cost $100,000
• If you filled an Olympic-size swimming pool with ink it would cost $5.9 billion.

Tree Facts

• A single mature tree can release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support 2 human beings.
• Each person in the U.S. generates approximately 2.3 tons of CO2 each year.
• If every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by one billion lbs annually. This is almost 5% of the amount that human activity pumps into the atmosphere each year.
• According to the USDA Forest Service, a tree generates $31,250 worth of oxygen, provides $62,000 worth of air pollution control, recycles $37,500 worth of water, and controls $31,250 worth of soil erosion, over a 50-year life span.

Your response: