Paper Saving Practices

At Macalester, about 3,150,000 sheets of paper are printed per year during a 30-week school year. Just one ream of paper is 6% of a tree, so if we cut the amount of paper we printed just in half by being conscious of what and when we print, we could save 189 trees per year!

Did you know that 35% of solid waste in landfills is paper waste? Please remember to recycle so we can keep reusable resources out of the landfills and save trees! Here are some more tips for saving paper.

Print multiple pages per sheet - use these instructions to learn how to print more than one page of a document on one sheet of paper, which is especially useful for long readings. If you are...

printing from a Mac, click here.
printing from a PC, click here.

Take notes on your pdf readings - instead of printing out all of your readings, read them on the computer and take notes on the document electronically! You will be able to access your electronic comments later in case you have to write a paper or use them for a class. If you are...

note-taking in Preview, click here.
note-taking in Foxit, click here.

Grade papers electronically - professors, instead of carrying around piles of papers to grade, have your students upload their essays to Moodle or through e-mail, grade them in MS Word electronically, then send them back through e-mail!

for instructions on electronic grading in MS Word, click here.

Change paper formatting - increase the margins, switch from 2 to 1.5 line spacing, and decrease the font size.

Look through your readings before you print - see if there are any title or footnote pages that you don’t need to print. Sometimes this can be up to ten pages that you can avoid printing! Simply change the page numbers under “From ___ to ___” in the printing box to reflect the ones you need.

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