Why are people so wasteful with printers?
My wife just started going back to school again. Her teacher sent out a massive (100 or so slide) PowerPoint presentation. Get this… he told them to print it up and take notes in the margin. I am horrified. The only saving grace in this, is that I have a laser printer here. I can’t imagine what a student with an ink jet is supposed to do… spend $40 on ink every two weeks? To make matters worse, the teacher used a dark background. So not only is 90% of the surface area of each page 100% black (waste of toner/ink), but there is now no place to write the notes! I am going to tell my wife to print to OneNote next time, and take notes there. Either that, or I am unplugging the printer.
When I worked at the college computer lab, I would see this kind of thing all the time. The student who had to hit “Print” on every Web page they saw. The person who insisted on printing every time they made a minor change to a paper, even though they weren’t near handing it in yet. And so on. I see it in the business world too, but there is something magical about the world of academia that they seem to think that printing is both free and environmentally kind. It is neither, not by a long shot.
J.Ja
People waste because they can. I don’t waste, because I’ve personally seen little kids fight for foot we throw out to the train tracks. Unfortunately, that doesn’t do any good for my wasteline since I don’t waste food.
I knew people who would literally print a few inch stack of reports everyday from the Oracle data base. Did anyone ever read that report? Maybe, but at most they glanced at it. It always frustrated me a lot, but there’s not much I could do about it.
Now of course, people could take this argument to the opposite extreme where they refer to books as “dead tree” books. But books are justifiable and the most economic means of getting content to people. You print 100 color books for $3 a piece, 100 people can simultaneously read the content at 1200 DPI offset color equivalent to 200 DPI continuous tone for the color parts and 1200 DPI for the black text. You buy one netbook, and only one person can read the content at 100 DPI for everything.
@George Ou
What I forgot to mention in my ire… it’s a “Business Ethics” class!
J.Ja
@George Ou
Books are a great tool, but they are also static text. Reports and other changing text are more suited for electronic needs. The information can change rapidly and printing excessive amounts can cost loads of money.
On the reporting, my company has worked hard to move them to electronic format for years. When I first started working here in 2001, green bar was still common place. Today, most of the reports are spooled off on the midrange system while a few are still printed. I want to say there was at least a 95% reduction in the amount of paper used a day. I am currently working on projects with other departments to cut down the same. The Intel Classmate PC will actually be very key in doing this. The netbook actually has the clarity I need to look at work prints for assembly. I am pretty excited about this project based on the fact that I want to be able to save a few trees here and there.
To me, Printers have always been a backwards technology. Computers were partially designed to reduce paper clutter, not increase it. Just my thoughts anyway.
My coworker prints emails all day single-sided. It infuriates me to no end. If I MUST print, I print duplex and I recycle the paper afterwards. I love my Canon IP4300 that duplexes automatically and was $40 (highly recommend Canon printers).
I guess all we can do at this point is lead by example, which we are already doing as techies.
While I certainly do not waste paper, I’ll add a few comments on why I prefer prints sometimes:
1. While several e-paper technologies are on their way, the LCD monitors are not as friendly for human eyes as plain paper is. Staring at paper for same number of hours does not cause as much eye strain. I am able to read faster, for longer, and with more attention when reading on paper. Whenever proof-reading my own documents, I am able to find ten times more typos while reading on paper than on LCD. While I do not fully understand why this is, it seems that the brightness levels of LCD, LCD being vertical while paper being at an angle, diffusive and anti-reflective appearance of print paper, DPI (as George pointed out), all could be contributing. Another example: I can flip pages of a book so fast to find the thing I am looking for. Do that with e-book software apps. They will be slow like hell in flipping pages. Text search advantage of electronic form helps, but does not always solve the issue.
2. Even if various software applications allow annotations on electronic documents, whatever I have used has simply not reached the level that pen and paper have. (I have never used Kindle or any other e-book but have used Tablet PCs). GUIs have not been able to match the fluency of hand-writing/diagramming/underlining etc. While touch-screens help, they still do not bear the same feel that paper/pen have. I like to store my annotations for years to come, (which has generally limited them to books rather than printouts for me since printouts are harder to maintain for long-terms), but am not sure if electronic-annotations pass that test even though it should be the other way around. (Not to talk about DRM protection making documents die after a predetermined time as FSF recently wrote.)
I note that I use a lot of notepads. Computers have not been able to replace those for me. Software for creating diagrams, mind-maps, mathematical equations, etc. all seriously lag behind what is so easy with paper. We have started fostering habits of drawing on paper and scanning into the computer, noting that diagramming on computer was inhibiting the speed at which we document our work.
Anyways, your article makes me realize that while I do not waste paper on printouts, I do ‘use’ a lot in the form of notebooks. (Note that I use the word “use” instead of “waste” for notebook paper. Hopefully technology will advance in the future to allow me to replace paper fully.)
@nucrash
I love books, and I love the format. It works really, really well for me. I really want to try a Kindle, but the price puts me off. While I buy a lot of books, I don’t buy enough for the $300 price tag to be offset by the $5 (give or take) savings per title. For me, books are here to stay.
But I don’t think books are really that wasteful, once they are purchased. It’s the endless printing of things which never get read which drives me nuts. My wife will print stuff and leave it on the printer for months… clearly she didn’t need it! After a while, I just take the items and run them back through the printer, so long as they don’t contain personal information on them. Let me tell you, it’s emabarassing being at the gym with workouts printed on the back of papers that originally invitations to a bachelorette party/lingerie shower!
J.Ja
I do some IT work for a school and frequently find halt-inch stacks of full-page photos, printed, and left on the printer.
I don’t believe that people are trying to be wasteful — I figure they just don’t think about it. There’s a great way to solve the problem though: Attach prints to their user account, and charge per copy.
Can anyone recommend good software for that?