Saturday, 7 March 2015

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #463 Unplug Your Printer

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #463 Unplug Your Printer


This can actually be a fun exercise to do. The suggestion is that you unplug your printer in your home office. The challenge will work even better if you also remove the paper to the opposite end of the house. The idea is that every time you need to print something you will be forced to think twice, because you will have to get up and go to fetch the paper from the other end of the house and plug in the printer before you can use it. Most of us are lazy by nature, and having to take all these extra steps before printing out a page will often result in not printing at all. Our laziness can provide us with the opportunity to think of an alternative action that prevents the use of paper. It may be that we email a file to someone, save the file to the hard drive, transfer the file to a memory stick or simply choose not to print at all. This little trick will alter the way you think about what you print and how much you print. It will save paper and ink, therefore valuable resources such as trees, reduce the amount of chemicals and plastics you use, as well as a little bit of energy. It may seem like insignificant amounts because our private use seems so small, but when you multiply by millions it all adds up very quickly. At least give it a try for a couple of months and see how your thinking changes.

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