Go green: don’t print this email!

[pne]

Occasionally, I receive email with footers containing admonitions along the lines of “Big changes start with little steps: don’t print every email” or “Think of the environment—please don’t print this email out” or “Think twice whether it’s really necessary before printing this email out”.

It makes me wonder how effective those are.

For starters, I wonder how many people actually do print out every email they receive. I know I certainly don’t, and I think most of my colleagues don’t, either. I do print out the occasional email, but comparatively few.

And on the other hand, people who really do print all of them out (rather than just “many” of them or even “most” of them)—I imagine that for them, it’s part of their workflow and they aren’t going to scale down merely because a tagline in an email requests them to do so. (For starters, how should they decide which emails to refrain from printing out? “All of them” takes a lot less deciding power than “certain of them (identified by which criteria?)”.)

Comments

[karen2205]

*introduces you to lawyers with paper based filing systems*

Yes, we still print emails at work (I rarely do so at home - usually only booking confirmations etc that I need hard copies of to take with me when travelling)

[pne]

Yes, I was wondering whether there are people who have to print out everything for legal reasons, to be able to produce them later on demand. (Who, I suppose, could in theory also have used a document management system to do so electronically, but that costs a pretty penny so not everyone will do so.)

Your example might not be legally required but merely part of their normal workflow.

But then again: what good is such an email footer going to do in such companies? The recipient is hardly going to stop printing out that particular message if they regularly print out everything, are they? In which case, the sender might as well have saved the electrons needed to transmit the request.

Again, I'm not really sure what good such taglines do.

[kaisa]

Some years ago I worked in a company, where the marketing department set rules on what we were supposed to put in every e-mail's footer. I suspect this is the same thing. I also saw quite a few times people printing long e-mails, where the last 2 or 3 pages were just footers or signatures. So in reality, those footers just make you waste more paper. :P