If you worked in an office a few years ago then you probably remember the days when we printed everything that moved, and often in triplicate. Then people started talking about paperless offices and it seemed that the days of printers were about to end altogether. That hasn’t quite happened but it is still clear that the amount of papers we now print has reduced greatly, and it is interesting to look at the reasons for this.
Different Communication Methods
It used to be that companies only really contacted you by letter, or by phone if it was really urgent. Nowadays the almost universal use of email has cut down drastically on the amount of paper which offices use. Unless you are in the habit of printing out all of your emails then this is something which means that you probably use a lot less paper every day.
Modern Technology
Another thing which is almost but not quite a thing of the past is the idea of printing off lots of papers before we go on holiday. E-tickets got the ball rolling on this and now that a lot of us travel with mobile devices there is simply no need to have paper copies of everything which we can see on screen. This is just one example of how modern technology has helped us use less paper in our lives, and if you think about other situations it will become clear that we are a lot less dependent upon printing things off than before.
Better Printers
Have you ever worked in an office in which you had to print something off about five times in order to get a decent copy? Old fashioned printers were very wasteful in that they had an annoying habit of producing smudged or crinkled sheets at the end of the process. This is no longer a problem and more and more of us are finding that it is possible to get things right first time.
Smarter Use of Printers
There are now some really clever pieces of software which mean that you don’t need to waste as much paper as you used to do. If you still get annoyed by printing things off and then seeing that one page has only a couple of words on it then perhaps it is time that you checked this out. It will make you waste less paper and will also help the planet.
More Public Awareness
Nowadays most of us feel bad about printing off a lot of sheets of paper and wasting Brother Toner Cartridges because we are aware of the effect on the environment which excessive printing causes. This is great news, because it means that the majority of people now look for ways to avoid printing off things which perhaps they don’t strictly need to print. Even if each of us just avoids using one or two sheets a day just think how that adds up once we multiply it out across the population of the world.
