Environmentally friendly printing - with these tips it will be easy!

When printing, users can pay attention to a wide variety of criteria. In addition to print quality and speed, environmentally friendly printing can also be an important reason for buying. When it comes to eco-friendly printing, it depends on the one hand on the user, on the other hand, but also on the other hand, when buying the printer on environmentally friendly and energy-efficient models are respected. What customers should pay close attention to and which tips can help, the following guide shows in detail!

Tip 1 - use the right paper

Anyone who has ever looked at the variety of paper types on the market, will have seen that there are not just normal printer or copy paper. Conspicuous in the field of environmentally friendly funds are recycled papers. Recycled paper is often referred to as eco-paper and is characterized by the fact that manufacturers recycle used paper to make copy paper.

The paper made from waste paper is usually available in light gray tones. Depending on the quality and workmanship, recycled papers can also be bought with a high degree of whiteness. In this case, manufacturers bleached the greyish paper afterwards. Fading occurs with various chemicals that dissolve darker colored particles from the paper.

The environmental paper has the great advantage that it is usually slightly cheaper to manufacture. That's because less energy and less water is needed to process it. In addition, increased demand for recycled paper will increase demand for recovered paper. Thus, less waste paper is disposed of, which in turn subsequently protects the environment. Recycled paper is sold in different shades of white.

The whiteness determines how light the paper is compared to normal copy paper. If a whiteness of 100 percent is achieved, then this corresponds to the brightness of the normal copy paper. However, such bright recycled paper is often just as expensive as buying plain paper.
Tip: Recycled paper with a whiteness of 80 percent is between 10 and 15 percent cheaper than buying ordinary copy paper.

Tip 2 - use duplex printing

Duplex printing is a feature that prints papers from both sides. Duplex printing has the advantage that half the paper consumption can be saved. However, it is not always easy to use the printer in duplex printing.

The simplest version is when the printer offers double-sided printing. In this case, print jobs are abandoned and the printer pulls the paper through the printheads twice. If the printer does not support this function, documents can still be printed on both sides - manual duplex printing is necessary.

With manual duplex printing, printed documents are placed on the back of the printer after printing. Pay attention that the printer also prints the paper on the right side. It may therefore be useful to do some test printing beforehand if the printer does not have manual duplex printing.

If larger quantities are then to be printed, the odd-numbered pages can first be printed so that the straight pages can then be printed on the reverse side.

Tip: Some MFPs can not only print pages on both sides but also scan them. For this purpose, documents are placed in the scanner, which automatically feeds the paper and scans it from both sides. This in turn saves time and energy from the multifunction printer.

Tip 3 - use the draft mode

Draft mode is a special print mode in which the printer uses very little ink to print documents. The draft mode has a reduced resolution compared to the normal print mode. In a direct comparison, however, the differences only become visible when photographs or particularly high-resolution contracts are printed in small print.

For this reason, printing in draft mode may generally be worthwhile. In draft mode, less ink is used, making written text seem paler. However, users save up to 40 percent on printer ink. If you want to save on printer ink, you should avoid cleaning mode from the printer. Cleaning mode is automatically performed at regular intervals for the majority of printers.

However, cleaning the printer heads consumes a lot of printer ink - which hurts the efficient and environmentally conscious use. The cleaning mode can be deactivated. To prevent the printer ink from drying out, the printer should be started up at least once a week. In addition, the printer should be in cool locations, so that drying out is no longer favored.

Tip 4 - Be aware of the printer

Conscious printing is the easiest way to print eco-consciously. In this case, users will think twice before each print whether paper printing is really necessary. More and more often it pays to print the PDF printing. When printing PDF documents are converted into a PDF format. Subsequently, the documents can be sent via e-mail to other persons. This saves paper and energy from the printer.

Tip: The printer often has copy functions built in. When copying documents are scanned and then printed. However, documents do not always have to be printed out directly. Some printers have the PDF Scan feature. Here, papers are scanned and stored directly on a USB flash drive or SD memory card.

Tip 5 - actively save energy

Inside the office, it's common to see printers constantly on. Even at night, printers are rarely turned off. The reason for this? Printers are always ready for use in this case and can be used at any time without waiting. Unfortunately, printers also consume power when not actively used. A laser printer can consume up to 150 watts in standby mode. Inkjet printers come to 30 to 50 watts. If you extrapolate these values, a lot of money is wasted.

The solution is to turn off the printer. Since manual switching on and off is not always practice-oriented, some printer models have energy-saving modes. The energy-saving mode ensures that the printer is automatically switched off after a short time without using it. If a print job is sent, the printer automatically turns on again.

The advantage? The printer does not have long waiting times with such a power saving mode. As a rule, the printer is immediately ready for use after being switched on automatically and can be used. However, manually turning it on and off may cause the printer to first need to configure itself before it can be used.