Think back to your last “first day of class.” You might have walked in, sat down, and been handed apaper syllabus 6-8 pages long (or more! Professors can be long-winded!). How often did you look back upon that syllabus over the course of the semester?
Professors, of course, hope that the answer is every single day, but in truth it was probably a couple of times throughout the semester. What happened to that syllabus after the class ended? Did you throw it away? Did you recycle it? Is it still stuffed somewhere in a folder, tucked into the back of the drawer, forgotten for the next twenty years (that’s where mine are…)?
Last year at Anoka-Ramsey the Sustainability Committee was contacted by our campus’s Central Services, who handles the printing for the college, to see if we could assist them in encouraging faculty to reduce their printing amounts. Like everything it seems, the cost of printing was increasing, and if printing continued at the current rates there was a risk that departments might greatly exceed their printing budgets for the year (and this doesn’t even touch on the environmental costs of using so much paper). The Sustainability Committee, led by Math Professor Christina Sonnek, decided to challenge departments to reduce their printing, and the results were somewhat staggering. Compared to the same month the previous year, faculty managed to save 52,844 sheets of paper in August 2017 and 101,811 sheets of paper in September 2017, for a grand total of 154,655 sheets of paper saved! If that wasn’t enough, the financial savings amounted to a massive $12,210.17!
How did they do it? Some departments did choose to go entirely “paperless,” putting course documents on D2L Brightspace and other websites, but it’s important to remember that even small actions can have a huge impact. The next time you need to print, consider:
- Can you put it online instead (quizzes, exams, notes, etc.)?
- If it needs to be printed, can you put it online and have students print it (eliminating the “extra” copies)?
- Set your default page margins to small (this uses 14% less paper!)
- Print double-sided–make this your default setting (Google how to do this or ask your friendly IT person)
- Change your line spacing to “Exactly,” and your spacing to 0 pt. when creating documents on Microsoft Word
- Can you have students turn it in online instead (via the Assignments folder in D2L Brightspace or turnitin.com, etc.)?
- If you need to write something down, can you use scrap paper instead?
- If you need to print something small out, can you put it on a half sheet of paper instead? Central Services even has a handy-dandy cutting service!
Don’t forget, once it’s been printed, used, and is ready for disposal, RECYCLE it! Even small actions can make a BIG difference!
Sustainability 