Hand in hand with going paperless see Going Paperless All Wrong

Everyone wants to go ‘green’. Printing to PDF is actually not a bad way to accomplish this. For example if you have a receipt for an online purchase, instead of printing it out like it recommends go ahead and print it to PDF. (I’ve never actually needed to use any of these receipts but I guess its good to have them) If you want a system that allows you to find it again, I know it sounds lame but send your receipt as an attachment to your gmail account and make sure to name the subject of the email with a good description. I would only recommend this as a consumer solution though.

Lets say you do end up printing something though how can you cut down on wasted sheets of paper and ink? The first thing to do is to install the most wonderful of programs Firefox. The next thing to do is install one of the plugins that makes Firefox so wonderful Adblock Plus that will take care of a lot of those pesky adds that would normally print out. Now you want to install the Aardvark Plugin this allows you to right click in the firefox browser and turn on Aardvark. Then you can select individual elements for removal (it will put a red box around them) and then press ‘r’ on your keyboard to remove them. You should try it out its pretty cool!

If that isn’t enough you can install the newly made free (ad supported, but not to annoying) Green Print World at first I was a little skeptical about this gizmo but it seems to work well. It automagically removes pages that would have been dumb to print, like blank pages that only contain a footer web address etc. It allows you to select pages to remove from your print as well as removing images or text if needed.