Crowdsourcing Email Signatures that Help the Environment

Today, as part of Microvolunteering Wednesday, we feature an opportunity found on Help From Home, a microvolunteering opportunity portal. Do you use email? Duh! Do you print the email out? Sometimes! Do you think about what you’re printing? Maybe not, but the following opportunity may help you and thousands of others to ponder that question.

Ever wondered why people print things for no reason other than to create a pile of paper in the corner? The folks at ThinkBeforePrinting estimate that more than 50 percent of printed pages are never even looked at.

The website has a free email banner that you can copy into your email signature to spread the word easily. You can help by putting this gentle reminder on documents, at the end of your emails and on your webpage (or blog). It will remind people that they should only print if absolutely necessary and to also consider how many pages they really need. For example if the second page is going to be completely blank then why select ‘print all’?

Other ways you can help are to provide a link to the ThinkBeforePrinting website on any website you have. You can also make a tutorial for creating custom email signatures – check out their website for more information!

Adding this simple message at the end of your emails will only take a few seconds to set up, and you, along with thousands of others, will be helping to save the environment by preventing waste paper: “Please consider the environment before printing.”