Reducing Paper Waste with Smart Copy Printer Settings in Fairbanks Offices

Even as digital workflows continue to grow, printed documents remain an important part of daily business operations. Contracts, invoices, presentations, reports, shipping documents, and employee records often require hard copies to support office workflows. Many businesses use more paper than necessary because their printers and copiers remain on default settings that are not designed to maximize efficiency. Choosing the right copy printer in Fairbanks, AK can help reduce paper waste, lower printing costs, and improve productivity. Discover the printer features and settings that can help your office print more efficiently while reducing unnecessary waste. 

Eliminating Paper Waste Worry

Before we dive into reducing paper waste in your office, you might be wondering why you should even be worried about cutting it down in the first place. Every unnecessary print job has a cost that goes beyond the price of paper. You also pay for toner, electricity, equipment maintenance, part replacement, storage, and document disposal. Take those admittedly small expenses per page, and multiply them across dozens or even hundreds of employees, and printing can become a substantial operating expense.

If you’re environmentally conscious, you should also be aware of the environmental impact that wasted prints can have, including water, energy, and timber costs. While recycling your excess pages helps reduce that impact, preventing unnecessary printing in the first place gives even greater benefits. 

The good news is that using smart printer settings can improve efficiency while reducing waste, a win-win for your budget and the environment. If you improve your printing practices, odds are high that you’ll see lower operating costs without sacrificing productivity. Now, let’s dig into the printer settings that can help you do that.

Set Double-Sided Printing as Default 

One of the easiest and most effective changes you can make is to enable duplex, or double-sided printing, and set it as your printer’s default. Many employees print documents exactly as their computer’s printer dialog shows. If the default setting is to print only on one side of each sheet, most people aren’t going to think twice before they hit print. 

By making duplex printing the standard setting across your office, you’ll immediately cut your paper usage in half with no extra effort from your employees. Of course, single-sided printing might still make sense for certain documents. In those cases, employees can opt to switch to single-sided printing for that one print job. But for most internal reports, meeting agendas, and reference materials, duplex printing is perfectly acceptable, and in some cases, preferable.

Print Multiple Pages per Sheet

While this might not be one you want to make the default setting for your office, printing multiple pages on a single sheet of paper can be a helpful tool for reducing paper waste in the right circumstances. Many printers will allow you to print 2, 4, or even 6 pages per sheet. This can be a helpful setting for printing out training materials, presentation slides, reference guides, or other materials that are easy to skim in a smaller format. While it’s not appropriate for every document, using 2 pages per sheet even a few times a month can reduce paper usage while keeping text readable.

Use Print Previews before Printing

Many pages of printer paper are wasted on simple formatting mistakes. Blank pages, oversized graphics, incorrect page breaks, and accidental extra pages often go unnoticed until you pick up your document from the printer. Encourage your employees to spend a few seconds looking over the Print Preview before they hit Print. This can help catch simple issues before paper is wasted. Remind them to look for problems like blank pages, incorrect margins, missing images, cut-off tables, and any other obvious formatting errors. This quick habit saves paper while reducing frustration and reprinting.

Print Only the Pages You Need

Oftentimes, entire documents get printed when only a few pages were actually necessary. Instead of printing a full 50-page report so you can reference 2 charts in it, be sure to select only the specific pages you need. Most print dialogue boxes allow you to enter page ranges or individual page numbers to specify which part of the document you want to print. Take advantage of this feature as often as possible, and you can eliminate dozens, or even hundreds of unnecessary printed pages throughout the year.

Choose Black and White When You Don’t Need Color

Color printing certainly has its place, such as for marketing materials, client presentations, and graphics-heavy reports. However, most internal documents can do without the color. Switching your default setting to grayscale or black-and-white printing reduces toner usage while extending the life of your much more expensive color cartridge. Reserve color printing for those documents where it will genuinely improve communication or professionalism. (And, again, be sure to check that Print Preview to ensure a document is showing in color if you want it printed in color.)

Reduce Page Margins and Adjust Layouts

Many documents have large margins and oversized fonts that increase their page count far more than you might realize. Reasonable adjustments to these things can reduce paper use without making documents any harder to read. Here are a few things you can toggle with on your document layout to reduce the length of your documents:

• Narrow margins slightly (reducing 1” margins to 0.75” can make a big difference)

• Use a slightly smaller font size, such as 10 or 11, instead of 12 

• Eliminate unnecessary page breaks

• Reduce extra spaces between paragraphs

• Print spreadsheets in landscape orientation 
  

These small changes to formatting often reduce the document length by several pages while keeping everything readable.

Use Secure Print Release

One overlooked source of paper waste in the office comes from abandoned print jobs. Employees accidentally print duplicates, forget to pick up their documents, or send jobs to the wrong printer, and those pages often end up being thrown out. Secure print release solves this problem by holding print jobs until the person who sent it authenticates themselves at the printer. That means fewer abandoned documents, less accidental printing, and, as an added bonus, better document security.

If you’re looking for a smart copy machine in Fairbanks, AK, that can help you reduce your paper waste, contact Arctic Office Products or stop by our showroom to see the machines we currently have in stock.