Earth Day at Oxy

On Friday, April 21, 2006 the Environmental Stewards class helped out at the Oxy Earth Day Fair in the quad at lunchtime by setting up a booth to talk about the many things that we have been doing this past semester to encourage campus greening. There was a decent turnout to the event and everything seemed to go smoothly. However, one thing stood out in my memory as something that was not as friendly towards all the acts that my classmates and I had been taking to help Occidental to reduce, re-use and recycle.

It was a lady that walked up to my friend and I and told us that printing on both sides of the paper is bad for the printer and that we shouldn't encourage others to do it. I was taken aback by this statement because most of the people that we had told about and showed how to print on both sides of the paper had encouraging and positive responses. It never occurred to me that there would be people out there that would not want to help conserve paper. I understand that for some printers it may not be the best idea to print on both sides as the ink already on the paper may cause the printer to jam. However, many of these printers are older models and the newer ones are able to easily print on both sides. Some of them are even capable of doing it on their own rather than requiring the user to step in and manually take the paper out and reinsert it to be printed on again. In general, I feel that saving paper by printing on both sides is better than worrying about the printer that is doing the printing. Especially at Occidental, all of the printers here are laser printers and are completely capable of handling double-sided printing as long as the process is followed correctly. I feel that especially here on our college campus we should worry about conserving the natural resources that we have like paper, because of the enormous use that we have for it. I encourage everyone to take the time to correctly follow the steps to double-sided printing and thus towards paper conservation.

Comments

[markvalli]

That's weird. We print two sided all the time at our off-campus office and sometimes at UEPI, without noticable harm to the printer. Either she has a fixation on office equipment or was in a bad mood.

[Jared Charity]

While I did not have the same experiences with the Earth Day event that Jennifer did I do agree on the fact that most people were extremely interested in the fact that you were able to print on both sides of the paper here at oxy. Being the one who came up with the idea about the cards. I found the project to be very positive. It even spurred me to think about the Stewarts in the future:
Even though I am graduating this semester I wish I would have known about the ability to print on both sides of the paper when I first came to oxy. I know it doesn't save you money when printing, but I do like the idea that you save paper while at the same time having the ability to just simply carry around less paper. However, I feel that I might not have the same reasoning as other people. For most people that are not environmentally aware there needs to be some sort of financial gain involved in order to get them to do it. That is why I propose that next semester the Stewarts work on possibly seeing if ITS can monitor the people who print on both sides and get some sort of discount in their printing fees. This financial gain could possibly move enough people to print on both sides. Now assuming most people start printing on both sides of the paper, which could reduce paper consumption by half. Thus would give oxy the ability to cut down on the amount of paper being purchased every year and essentially save some of the allotted money the school sets aside for paper. However, I don’t propose that we save it, but rather put the extra money into purchasing recycled paper instead of non-recycled. Obviously the numbers would have to be punched to see if it works out evenly, but it would be something to look into!

[t]

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