There are many ways that greener thinking has changed our awareness and helped to improve the eco-footprint of the St. Paul’s School community. There has been an effort to reduce the amount of paper used, with some School publications being distributed online in PDF file formats instead of being printed. This helps us all see that even small changes can make a difference, especially when multiplied by many people being mindful about the environmental impact of their actions.

One small change in thinking that could help in the larger picture is to stop and think before printing. It’s not just thinking about whether you really need to print something or not (which is the best way to save paper), but also about taking a few extra seconds to be sure which printer you are sending your print job to.  There are many times when a printer is found at the end of the day with a stack of unclaimed pages in the tray, sometimes with multiple copies of the same print job.  If you send your print job to the wrong printer you may think it hasn’t printed at all and try again, but if you are printing a  fifteen page journal article from JSTOR and are unknowingly sending it multiple times the wasted paper piles up fast.

So next time you need to print while at Ohrstrom, pause, and look at the destination in the print dialogue box.  Or if you have sent something off to print but it isn’t showing up in the printer you expected, open up the print dialogue box again and see which printer is selected. Then check the printer to see if your pages are there before printing again.

Think, then print.  The Library staff will thank you, the SPS community will thank you, and the trees will thank you.

Image courtesy of yewenyi under this Creative Commons license.

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