Recycle Your Fax Paper, Or Reduce It?
Those who are worried about the environment have been known to say you should pay attention to the three “R”s when it comes to using materials like paper or plastic. These include recycling, reducing, and re-using. Since fax machines use more paper than most other office equipment, you should probably start there when trying to go greener.
Everyone knows what recycling is, but not all of us do it. Some people might not think of it, or they might just forget to do it. In some places, there are no recycling facilities, so it may be difficult for people in those areas to be able to recycle. Or recycling facilities may only take certain things, like plastic, but not others, such as paper. Recycling can help to lessen the amount of natural resources we use, since it can use the same materials several times. Paper is often made with recycled paper pulp. Many schools and businesses use recycled paper towels. Some businesses even advertise their efforts to “go green” by noting right on their printed materials that they are using recycled paper. Recycled paper can still be of good quality, and many customers will appreciate the fact that a business is recycling, and this could help to gain their loyalty.
Re-using can also be helpful when you are trying to be a bit more “green.” Your fax machine might produce a lot of junk, whether unwanted faxes, or just cover sheets and pages you don’t need anymore. You can print things on both sides of the paper, or re-use these old faxes in your computer printer to print out other things. You can place a paper bin on your desk, and use these faxes as scratch paper or for writing inter-office notes, rather than using fresh sheets of paper all the time.
But what about reducing? We’ve already stated how fax machines make a lot of waste paper, but we haven’t discussed the ways that already exist that allow you to cut down on this excess paper usage. With a normal machine, you can’t really decide what to print out and what not to print out, since you don’t know if a fax is important until you’ve already printed it. That’s one of the main problems with analog fax equipment. With an online faxing membership, you are able to see things before you print them. This results in fewer things being printed. Of course you’ll just delete all the junk faxes rather than printing them, but you can also reduce the amount of other things you are printing. You don’t need to always print the cover sheet. If a fax is rather short, and you’ve already read it online, you might decide that you don’t even need a printed copy of it at all. And if you do decide you want one later, it’s easy to go back to the file and print out a copy. You can decide what faxes to print, and even what pages of an individual fax that you want a hard copy of. recycling machines