Printing is so easy to do that it’s not hard to forget it can be pretty harmful to the environment. After all, it’s just one push of a button and a few sheets of paper, right? In reality, the chemicals contained in the ink you print will couple with the energy-consuming machinery that gets the printing done and the reams of paper that you’ll go through in a year to create an office task primed for negative environmental effect. The greenest thing you can do when it comes to printing is to not do it at all, but in today’s office that’s often far from realistic. Many of us may have switched to e-mail for most of our communications and even done away with printed notes during meetings and presentations, but there are still times when one has to put it on paper. Here are five ways to green your printing.

1. Choose an Eco-Friendly Font

For most of us, the only consideration when selecting a font is what will look best for the document, but the font you pick can be responsible for a little ink use or a lot of ink use and one of the ways to print greener is to use less ink. Steer clear of heavy fonts or anything in bold and opt for lighter fonts (often in the Serif family) with thinner lines. Better yet, download Ecofont. Ecofont is a font based on Vera Sans that’s been reworked with holes throughout to use 20% less ink—and it’s free to download and use.

2. Opt for Energy Star

If you’ve got a printer that’s in fine working order, we’re not saying you should send it to recycling and pick up a new Energy Star-rated model (buying unnecessarily is never green), but if you’re in the market for a new printer, make sure you look for that little Energy Star logo. Energy Star printers use less energy and can save you over $100 on your energy bill during their lifetimes. Take it a step further, though, by choosing an Energy Star-rated printer that’s also remanufactured or made from recycled materials.

3. Print Only What You Need

This rule applies in general (if you can do it electronically, don’t print it), but also in a more specific way. If you’re someone who often prints from the web, you’re probably printing images and even pages you don’t need. Eco-friendly printing software, like GreenPrint, allows you to easily view what’s being printed and automatically eliminates pages that have only a few lines or ads. You can also opt to not print images (all those ads alongside articles can use a lot of ink) or certain text on one or all of the pages. GreenPrint will show estimated cost savings as you delete components and provides you with the option to create a PDF of what you’re about to print, saving you from printing completely in some cases…and without ever charging you a penny.

4. Rethink Your Ink

If you’ve been purchasing all your ink in boxes from the nearest Staples or straight from the manufacturer, you may want to reconsider for the sake of you wallet as well as the environment. Remanufactured ink cartridges offer serious savings and keep about 5.5 pounds of plastic out of the landfill. As a bonus, they also use less energy in their creation than traditional cartridges. You can find remanufactured ink cartridges for most of the major brands here.

5. Pick Paper-Free Faxing

Faxing fits under the printing category and there’s no reason not to go green with it as well. Instead of investing in a traditional fax machine, which will take up space and require use of a phone line, try an online fax service like Efax, which operates via e-mail and skips the paper step completely. You can send all your e-documents to fax machines around the world and receive faxes through your own fax number via e-mail without the cost of owning an actual fax machine—or those frantic trips to Kinkos. It’ll help to have a scanner/printer for when you need to send a hard copy document, though.

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