The Brown & White

Have you ever wondered why Lehigh's printers are out of paper when you go to print an essay or a packet from Blackboard?

Perhaps it's because a fellow student just printed a few hundred pages on your dorm's printer.

Printed pages at Lehigh fly faster than Usain Bolt in the 100-meter dash, and while we applaud the university's plans to track wasted paper for every student, it likely won't solve the problem.

The tracking system, called PaperCut, will allow every student to view the number of pages he or she prints, as well as the amount of carbon dioxide emitted and the number of trees killed as a result.

While we're sure students would be sad if they knew their printing directly contributed to the destruction of the beautiful magnolia tree on the UC front lawn (or journalism students' beloved Liberty Tree), this hypothetical number probably isn't going to cause any lost sleep when a student has to print a 50-page packet from Blackboard.

This brings up another issue: Professors give us too much to print. Students can only be so conscious about their number of pages when the amount of extra reading on Blackboard for a class outnumbers the pages in that class' textbooks. Still, it's a better option than overpriced textbooks.

But students absolutely do need to be more conservative in the amount of trips to the printer. The PaperCut software determined that two students printed over 1,000 pages during the last week of January. I'm sure the students in question must have had a lot of reading, but maybe they should start reading some of their packets on the computer instead.

That goes for all of us. Sure, we are used to having a copy of our assignments in front of us when we read, but is it so bad to have to read from a screen? Between our computers and televisions, we spend most of the day in front of a screen anyway. What's the difference?

There are countless other ways for us to start conserving more paper. Try copying and pasting your documents into Microsoft Word. At the very least, it will save you a few lines and maybe a page or two.

You could also not print the title page or the last few pages of references. How many times have you gone through the sometimes endless amount of endnotes in a packet anyway? It's a quick fix. Just change the range of pages printed.

Every student should also stop printing multiple copies of documents. Be patient! Just because something isn't printing right away doesn't mean it won't eventually. We've all been to the libraries and seen the stack of abandoned papers, many of which are duplicates of the same thing.

We are lucky because the university offers us free printing (one of the few things we, as students, get for free) while many other universities must pay by the page.

But this is not a privilege we should abuse. We are all guilty of it because it's not something we usually think about, but next time you go to print, think about how much paper you waste. Conservation is something everyone should do, and this is one of the easiest ways to cut back and help out the environment.

Mother Nature will be very grateful.