Stop Printing the Internet

Last weekend I got a new television (our old one died) just in time to watch some great NCAA basketball games. While watching one of the games on Saturday evening I saw a new Progressive Insurance commercial. The premise of the commercial is that Progressive can’t prevent us from becoming our parents but can save us money on insurance. In the commercial there was a scene where we’re told, “we don’t need to print the Internet.” The commercial made me chuckle and it inspired this blog post.

How to Limit Paper and Ink Usage When You Print

There are some instances when we do need to print things. When those instances occur there are ways to reduce the amount of ink and paper you use.

The easiest way to save paper is to simply make sure that you’re only printing what you need. When the print dialogue box pops-up select a specific page or two to print rather than using the default “print all pages” found on most printers.

Printliminator is a handy little bookmarklet for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Printliminator allows you to highlight a webpage and select only the elements which you wish to print. You can install Printliminator in seconds by just clicking and dragging it into your browser’s toolbar.

How to Encourage Students and Colleagues to Limit Printing

If your school uses Google Workspace, you can encourage your students and colleagues to limit their printing by using a couple of Google Docs features. The first is to add a watermark to your Google Documents that reads something like, “Only Print if Essential” or “Don’t Print.” Another option is to disable the option for collaborators to print Google Documents.

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