Tip 15. Print in Duplex (Two-Sided) As Often As You Can

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15. When Printing, Use Duplex (2-Sided) Printing
When evaluating anything, there are quantitative and qualitative measures. Quantitative measures mean you have a number. For example, the price of a box of paper is a number. A cost difference of five or ten percent often can sway a decision when buying paper. What if you could save 50% on all the paper you buy? That seems like an easy decision to make: half-price can be very attractive.

When you print onto both sides of paper, it is like getting a 50% discount on all your paper. With that much of a savings, we think you should print duplex as much as you can. Of course, you need to have a duplex-capable printer, which is discussed in Tip-16. In addition to the money you save, your duplex printing has an important environmental benefit. By reducing the amount of paper you use, you reduce the resources – energy, water, trees, recycled paper – needed to create that paper. This makes duplex printing a very desirable strategy for reducing the volume of paper that you use.

Saving Ink and Toner
When you print duplex, you reduce the amount of paper you use. But that does not save the amount of ink or toner that you are using. But there is a way to do that. Modify your print settings to use "Draft" mode (sometimes known as "Economy mode") and you will save in yet another way.

Two-Sided Copying
We encourage you to take this idea of two-sided printing one step further and use it with copiers. Many copiers support two-sided copying, and we suggest you use this feature as much as you can Copiers that support duplex-copying typically have several modes. You can take a two-sided original and produce a two-sided copy. Another mode enables taking a single-sided original and creating a two-sided copy. In both of these modes, you are using less paper than if you were to print single-sided.