Can you imagine a day when we no longer have to cut down millions of trees a year so we can produce paper for printing? In my humble opinion that day will come. Back in the late 80’s and early 90s there was a lot of talk about the “paperless office”. The personnel computer was here and we were then introduced to the ink jet and laser printer which could be connected to the computer. What a marvelous invention, gone were the days of the electric type writer and all of the manual corrections that went with that form of printing. Now we could create documents that were easy to correct & save to a computer. But wait, now we could also print just about anything we found on that new platform, the internet. So instead of ushering in the paperless office we created offices that were producing much more printed pages than before.

So what happened was simple, when you make something really really easy to use people, will use it more and more. I have no scientific proof for this but I know it to be true. Think about it, before ink jet printers we had the electric typewriter and of course we made mistakes. Mistakes back then were corrected with a thing called whiteout ink or tape. For those of you too young to remember the whiteout ink was in a small bottle with a tiny brush. When you made a mistake you would have to stop, back the paper up in the printer, dab some whiteout on your mistake, blow on it to make sure it was dry, manually turn the paper back to the position of the mistake and start typing again. And then came the next great invention, whiteout on a roll, roll your mistakes away. Even with the fastest typeset this was still slow going. The end result, you only printed what you had to.

With the modern ink jet or laser printer we connect it to a computer that has a program installed that lets us type using our computer & keyboard. Making a mistake now means you simply go to the mistake, hit the delete button and retype. Spelling error, no problem, run your spell checker. Want to know how many words in that document, easy, run your program that checks the word count. The boss wants multiply copies, no need for carbon paper anymore, just enter the number of copies you want and presto, out they come on the printer. So what do you think happened to the “paperless office”? It went right down the tubes. People actually printed more, lots more, like crazy more.

This was not only limited to the office, when I got into this business in 2004 producing home photo’s was the rage. Kids would also print everything they seen when on line, I actually had mothers tell me their kids were using up all the ink they were buying on this. Not to mention the mothers were printing every recipe they seen and who knows what the fathers were printing, fishing tips maybe. A printing craze ensued.

That’s then and now is now. Here’s my point, even though my business Ink & Toner Solutions is in the business of selling ink and toner cartridges for these printers, what I would like to propose is kill your printer. I know you’re sitting there thinking this guy must be crazy, he’s advocating something that would potentially kill his business. That may be but what’s the right thing to do?  CVS did the right thing when they stopped selling cigarettes. They lost millions in revenue, this was one of their biggest profit centers but they made a hard decision and did the right thing. Selling a product that is killing people went completely against what CVS was all about.

When I started Ink & Toner Solutions my reason was to sell high quality Eco-friendly ink and toner cartridges that helps to keep them from ending up in the landfills. We do this by reusing the spent printer cartridges and remanufacture them to original specifications. It was my way of contributing to saving our resources and reusing and recycling a product. Well times have changes and there are better ways to save our documents than printing them and saving a hard copy. There are excellent products available to everyone from the individual home owner to a large corporation that will save and store any and all information you can think of.

In my next post I’ll go over some of the options out there that just may help you not to print so much and help to save some of those trees.