"Green printing," an effort by the Purchasing Advisory Committee and Computing Services to reduce waste, will soon debut at the Berry printing window.
Last year, between 25 and 40 percent of documents were printed but never retrieved from public printers.
"The new strategy is designed to fix a system with inherent problems," said Mike Hogan, Operations Manager of Computing Services.
Students will direct documents to a campus-wide queue and will now have to use a password to print documents in person from one of several "release stations."
"Dartmouth is one of the last colleges not to charge for public printing," Hogan said. "It's important to use only what we need."
Although the timeline for the system's implementation is uncertain, Hogan hopes that it will be running this term.
Green printing is one of the first projects undertaken by the PAC, an offshoot committee of Tucker Foundation's Environmental Conservation Organization.
Chair Katie Greenwood '04 founded the student and faculty group last spring.
Following the implementation of green printing, the PAC will tackle two new projects.
Only about half of the departments on campus are using recycled paper -- the PAC wants to change that.
"We've won a lot of people over to using recycled sheets," said Jim Leech, ECO representative from Dartmouth College Design Printing and Mailing Service.
"It would be great to get more decisions based on environmental interests," said Bill Hochstin, Dartmouth's Material's Management Coordinator.
The second item on the PAC agenda is DDS take-out. The PAC wants DDS to use materials other than plastic for take-out containers that cost DDS over $83,000 a year.
DDS has no immediate plans to eliminate its use of plastic products.
"We've been searching for an alternative for quite some time," Beth Jones, purchasing manager for DDS, said.
"There are very few paper products that can do that. When we find one, we will use it."
But DDS plans to replace printed paper products with recycled paper starting this spring, Jones said.
