Tips on Lowering the Amount of Printer Ink and Paper You Use

If you use a printer on a regular basis in your home or office, your are no doubt painfully aware of the cost of ink cartridges and paper. Most inkjet printers are fairly inexpensive; it’s the ink and paper that for exceed the $150+ you spent on the printer itself.

So here are some tips for decreasing the amount of printer ink and paper you use.

1. Read Documents Online: Instead of printing articles, PDF documents, and other online material, try to read content online instead. If you have an iPhone or similar mobile device, you can easily download articles to your smart phone and read them at your leisure. (See this article on 5 reading applications for the iPhone)

2. Save Documents as PDFs: With most computer systems, you can save web pages as PDFs and then open those PDFs on your computer. The application you use to open your PDF, such as Adobe Reader, or for Mac user, the application Preview, includes a tool for highlighting text on PDF documents just as you would on paper documents.

3. Strip the Ads: If you must print articles from online sites, always check to see if the document you’re going to print includes what is called a Print-only option. Clicking this option usually strips the document of the ads and other non-pertinent images that require a lot of ink to print. So basically you get a text-only version of the article. If there is no text-only option, by all means, select the text in document that you want to print and paste it into a text editor application, and print from there.

4. Printing Pages: Know the number of pages you’re actually going to print. When you click the print button on your computer, check the printer application to see exactly how many pages will be printed. If you can preview the pages before you print, you might discover the last page only has a sentence or two that might not needed to be printed. You might only need to print a few of the most important pages or parts of the document. (See Fig. 1)

5. Duplex Printing: Some advance inkjet or all-in-one printers make use of what is called an auto duplex accessory. You can reduce the amount of paper you use simply by printing paper on both sides of each sheet.

6. Greyscale Printing: If your printer and printer application allows it, you can save lots of ink by printing documents in greyscale (light black) color. (See illustration 3). Most documents don’t need to be printed in the standard full color mode. Though black ink cartridges are typically the most expensive, you can use less of it just by printing in greyscale mode.

7. More Per Page: Your printing application may also enable you to print two or more pages of a document on a single sheet of paper. This layout will mean that printing will be smaller, so you might want to print one page using this layout to make sure the results are acceptable. (See Figure 3)

8. Recycle Cartridges: Many printer and ink companies are now offering recycling services for empty cartridges. The office supply store, Staples, “recycled nearly 24 million cartridges in the U.S. through...various ink and toner cartridge recycling programs.” They offer $3 per cartridges toward future store purchases.