• The ENERGY STAR feature in a typical medium to high speed copier can reduce that machine is annual electricity costs by as much as 60 percent.

• Using ENERGY STAR labeled equipment helps reduce the air pollution including significant emissions of sulfur dioxide nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide which contribute to the problems of smog acid rain and global climate change associated with energy generation.

• Equipment will produce less heat when powering down contributing to a cooler more comfortable workspace; lowering air-conditioning costs and helping reduce equipment failure which helps increase the copier is life.

• A copier with fast and reliable duplexing double sided copying can reduce office paper use by 25 percent or more saving money in the process - (Solid Waste Management Coordinating Board and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency April 2000) . Also reducing paper use can contribute to reduction in natural resource consumption as well as in energy used to create paper.

Why you should save paper

Paper accounts for more than half of all municipal solid waste. Anything we can do to save paper will help reduce the amount of trash going into landfills and it will also reduce energy use and pollution associated with manufacturing transporting and recycling new paper products. Whether you have a home office or work in an office with others you can save paper by implementing some minor changes in your work habits.

Tips to Save Paper:

• Make every effort for the Paperless Office Computers seem to have actually increased our use of paper. But we can still do as much as possible on screen making printouts and copies only when truly necessary. For instance, managing your emails electronically not printing out a copy of every email.

• Review Drafts Using On-Screen Tricks: People often get screen blind after looking at a document on the screen for a long time. This allows errors to gone unnoticed. An on screen trick that will allow you to review your document from a seemingly different perspective is to temporarily change the font size by using zoom to higher percentage. This makes the words easier to read and shifts things around a bit giving your eyes a new view of the document.

• Print Pages Passages, or Sections Sometimes you may need a printout of only part of a large or medium sized document. Perhaps you need to review one or two pages of a many-page document or maybe you need just one section of a large spreadsheet. You may find the printing options in Microsoft Word Excel and PowerPoint helpful in your quest to review your work but also minimize the number of pages you print.

• Use Double Sided or Print Two Up Anytime you have to print or make photocopies always try to do so double sided. Most copiers today have features that will allow one sided to two sided copying and many laser printers allow duplex printing. Check with your office geek if you are not sure.

• Use Obsolete Printouts for Note Paper For paper that still has a blank side but is not pristine enough to go into the printer for one last round of printing you can still get more out of it by using it for taking notes at meetings and whatnot. A clipboard is a convenient way to create a scrap-paper notepad. If you are a hard core paper saver you can cut old printouts into fourths or sixths and make a stack of them to use for writing notes and phone messages. Both methods will reduce the number of new note pads and message pads you need to buy.

• Papers Final Resting Place: Papers proper final resting place is the recycle bin of course. This does not really reduce the amount of paper you personally use but it does reduce the number of trees that get cut down since the paper you recycle will be turned into other paper products.