Going Green

Amy Barber
Dawn Musso
GOING GREEN
Our going green idea is cutting down on paper waste, specifically from printers. Students are constantly printing here at USM in the computer lab. This would not be so much of a problem if students were not so wasteful with the paper. There are 14,777 students that attend the University of Southern Mississippi so just imagine how much it costs for supplies like toner, printer, computers, fax machines, photocopiers, ink, and paper, recycle bines and a recycle company to come and pick up wasted paper. We all have to admit that we print the wrong pages sometimes or realize we do not need what we printed. What do we do with it? We throw it right in the trash can and never think another thing of it. We found many resources supporting our idea of saving paper by cutting down on printing. Following are examples of our resources and explanations of what they are and how they save paper.

The first article we found was about new software called GreenPrint which was designed for a fortune 500 company. This was done so that it could reduce paper waste. This is a major problem in today’s society how much we waste and how much money we spend. This program has a free 30 day trial period. The University could purchase this program for $35 which is half of the original price.
The company from the article is LTS, and their staff were the first to test the software. LTS staff member Jason Slipp says, "Technology can't solve our problems with printing, but it will help curb it.” The firm started to use this program and saw that it cut their paper decrease by 20 percent, so they decided to install the program to their media center. As a result of this installation of software 1500 pages were printed but only 5 percent was saved which lead to only a $5 in savings. With any new type of technology software being introduced to a firm or a college campus it takes time for everyone to get adjusted to the software and there are always so glitches.
The second article we found was about a new program that MSU is using called MavPrint. It works just like an ATM machine. The student sends the document to the printer and the MavPrint receives it and the money is deducted from the students account. Now of course, this is not the perfect fix to a situation. With MavPrint there is a 300 allotted page print at the beginning of each semester. If during that semester you go over your limited then they charge the student.
The third example is from the University of Technology of Sydney. They did a collection every weekday for the study in 2007. The collection of cardboard and paper from recycling was 250 tons but only 10 percent went to landfills. This help save about 5000 trees and about 1500 tones of greenhouse gases.
Go Print is another print monitoring system and it charges a small printing fee and saves thousands of dollars annually. There are over 300 College, Universities and High School campuses as well as Public Libraries, Medical Centers using this software. This program is being used in West Lafayette school. During the summer semesters the students are not charged for printing out any documents. It showed that 34 percent of waste was reduced. It allots the students 500 black and white pages to be able to print after the 500 pages a fee is implemented where the student will have to add money to a machine which is located on the campus.
The general ideas that we came up with to save paper on our own are using the computers on campus or labs to take notes and keeping the notes and homework assignments on a PDF, jump drive, floppy, CD, or a hard drive. If it was necessary to print out a document maybe there would be one printer in a main office that work could be sent to if we needed to print a limit could be set and a fee if needed. If we had to print set the computer and printers to print double-sided which helps cut down on paper use. The campus should provided recycle bins in every area where there is a printer, copier, fax machine. As students, we pay enough for our books and tuition each year and it keeps going up, but this may give us the incentive that we need to be more conscious of what we are doing before we waste so much paper on print documents that we begin to get charged for it.
With being mindful of our environment we can help save unnecessary trees being cut down and harmful greenhouse gases pollution our air that we breathe. This will also help with animals having some foliage to eat so they do not starve. This could help save trees and cut down on gases. There is also Google docs which is a service where your files have an online backup of your documents, and Word docs you can save PDF files, which help you get access to paper files so you don’t waste paper (Kristie Lorette). We’re also depleting our forests, unnecessary use of energy, and chemicals to process paper which leads bad gases in the air for us to breathe.

http://media.www.thebrownandwhitecom/
http://www.green.uts.edu.au/
http://www.greenliving.suite101.com/
http://media.www.pucchronicle.com/