6 Tips for Crushing the Haas Paper Saving Challenge!

Each year, Haas Berkeley students print 773,754 pages of paper – that’s 4 TONS of paper per year! Did you know that this amount of paper weighs as much THIRTEEN Grizzly bears?!

As Haas students, we are fortunate to receive such a generous printing credit from our school. While printing documents can be helpful towards completing assignments and visualizing information, paper and printing uses a lot of our earth’s valuable resources. While it may seem as though printing a few pages a day doesn’t amount to much, it’s important to understand that the entire student population of Berkeley prints MILLIONS of pages per year, collectively.

To help us save resources and work towards Haas’ vision of becoming the most sustainable business school in the U.S., we would like to share the following tips to help you print more responsibly during your time at UC Berkeley, and to crush the Paper Saving Challenge (sign up)!

6 Tips for Responsible Printing:

1. Pause and think: Do I really need to print this? Most of the documents we print can be read on a computer, tablet or phone. Using your computer for reading has benefits such as better file organization and ease of accessibility. You can also ask your professor if you can take notes on an electronic device at the start of the semester.

2. If you need to print lecture slides because you prefer to work with physical copies, make sure to print multiple slides on each page. Most of the time, lecture slides can be read comfortably this way. Even if you print two slides per page, you’ve used half as much paper for that job. It’s simple and easy!

3. Print double sided. Why carry all that extra paper around? Print on both sides of each sheet to reduce half the amount of paper you would have used printing single sided.

4. Format your documents to use less paper. Reduce the default width of your margins and decrease your font size from 12 to 10. You can also use eco fonts such as Century Gothic. You’ll be surprised how helpful these small steps are in reducing the total amount of pages you print.

5. Print only the pages you need. Do this by checking the print preview before pressing print. Avoid printing blank pages, citations or appendices unless absolutely necessary.

6. If you accidently print the wrong document or find that half your paper is blank, do not throw it away. Re-use it for notes or as a backup name card in your Haas classes.

The HBSA sustainability committee is working closely with other organizations to help you keep track of your printing habits. Even once the Paper Saving Challenge is complete, our plan is to keep you informed of how successful our paper saving efforts have been!

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to the HBSA Sustainability committee at hbsa.sustainability@gmail.com. We would love to hear from you. Hope to see you sign up for the challenge!

Thank you for being a part of the solution and helping Haas become the greenest business school in the world!