Letter: Double-sided printing could save valuable paper

Much of the waste generated on Duke's campus doesn't make economic or environmental sense. The best example is printing on public clusters, especially E-reserves. The percentage that is actually read in time for class aside, they take up a huge amount of paper.

Based on an article in The Chronicle on Sept. 20, 2001, "Duke students are printing an average of 80,000 to 105,000 pages per week in Perkins Library and Lilly Library alone, contributing to a total 6.25 million printed pages each year in the Office of Information Technology's clusters." The article said that OIT had decided not to purchase double-sided capable printers, which clearly could reduce the paper usage to almost half, on the grounds that they were expensive and easily jammed.

Maybe so, but now that we have 4 of them in the Perkins lab, this capability has not been announced. It's as easy as clicking the "Layout" tab on the Macs or the "Properties" button on the PCs within the printing menu, and it's just as fast.

So next time you are in the Perkins lab and are printing something that doesn't need to be one-sided, remember to use this new feature in order to save paper and money.