Duplex Printing Initiative
// projects / duplex
In Spring of 2005, Emma met with Stanford's Residential and Academic Computing department, which oversees the computers and printers that are available to students: “I wanted to come up with ways to make people print double-sided more to reduce the massive amounts of paper we use on campus. The Stanford Procurement department had just bought new printers with duplex capacity for all of Stanford, making it easy and possible to print double sided on every machine. At first, I created a poster that was placed by all of the public printers that gave instructions for how to duplex print, and why people should do it. These were distributed around campus, and resulted in moderate reductions in paper use. However, since it takes a little time to print double-sided, we kept working on the idea. The first idea was to make duplex printing cost less, but the people at academic computing said that it was technically impossible to do so. However, Emily Humphreys met with them more this year, and they agreed to make duplex printing the default in all of the public computers, effective Spring Quarter 2006. Check out the article in The Stanford Daily "Printers Will See Double" for more info. We see this as an enormous accomplishment and hope other schools will also adopt this policy, saving thousands of trees.”