One printer at a time

Hayden Hamilton is battling one of the modern office’s chief tech problems – the river of wasted and useless pages coming out of printers.

The problem is not a small one. Some government agencies have found, through waste audits, that between 15 and 20 percent of all pages printed by office workers goes unused.

Hamilton saw that problem first-hand, working several years ago at a large Ford Motor office near London. One day he was struck by the daily flow of thousands of unclaimed sheets of paper piling up at the company printers: pages with four lines of text on the last sheet, pages with useless legal jargon, pages with a single Web URL, pages with a few images and a few ads, or pages with pointless boilerplate stuff that no one reads.

“I decided there had to be a better way to reduce that waste,” Hamilton said.

After researching options, he didn’t find what he wanted. So he and an associate, James Kellerman, began developing GreenPrint, a software download that reduces the number of pages a person prints at their home or office.

In 2006, the 30-year-old Hamilton launched Portland-based GreenPrint Technologies, with Kellerman as chief technology officer. The five-person company has seen interest grow as more people learn about how GreenPrint works.

“We call what we’re developing environmental software,” Hamilton said. “It’s a green evolution in how we use printers.”

People can download a free copy of GreenPrint and use it for 14 days. Continuing to use it will cost $35.

GreenPrint creates a virtual printer that acts just like a physical printer. When you order a print job, the software analyzes the document, finds and eliminates wasted space (such as ads or small images) and then directs the job to your actual printer.

The software displays reduced-size images of the original pages in the print job. Pages that GreenPrint considers unneeded or wasteful show up in red shading. The user can change settings and allow more or less of the total print job to be printed.

But typically a six-page printout can be shrunk to about three or four pages.

A big boost came last year when Wall Street Journal technology writer Walt Mossberg test-drove GreenPrint and said it did exactly what it claimed.

“Overall, GreenPrint is a good product – a simple solution to an annoying and wasteful problem,” Mossberg said.

A lot of interest is coming from business and corporate customers. GreenPrint has an enterprise version that allows managers to keep tabs on the volume of pages printed by a department, by a single user, or by an entire office. It also permits managers to track total pages saved by using GreenPrint.

GreenPrint has also released a custom font – called EverGreen – designed to reduce paper consumption by 15 to 20 percent. That font manages to be slimmer than traditional Web browser fonts, but also remains easily readable, said Hamilton.

People can download the EverGreen font for $5, and don’t need to download GreenPrint to use it.

No one has accurate data on how much paper is wasted by printers in the United States. One study by printer manufacturer Lexmark said the average U.S. office worker throws out or wastes 1,500 pages per year. Citigroup estimated each sheet of wasted printer paper costs 6 to 13 cents, depending on amounts of ink, toner and recycling efforts.

Several other tech firms have tried to do something similar to GreenPrint, including FinePrint Software, Inc., which has a product called FinePrint. Hamilton said FinePrint is targeted to auditors and others who use large spreadsheets, not Web or word documents.

GreenPrint is currently available only for PCs. Versions for Mac and Linux are expected later this year.

People who become users of GreenPrint discover how easy it is to conserve paper, Hamilton added.

“It becomes an entirely different way of printing. We hope it becomes as fundamental a concept as recycling was 20 years ago,” he said.

While the company is small, Hamilton said he hopes to recruit backing from investors in order to help the company grow. It’s clear that if more people adopt green printing, larger firms will enter the market, threatening GreenPrint’s future.

“What we’re doing is not really rocket science. This is an area that people haven’t associated with conservation or greenness,” he said. “I don’t think the high tech industry as a whole has made this a part of their mission.”