GreenPrint’s Green Prince, Portland Tribune
July 7th, 2009 | Published in Print
An innovative software company eliminates that annoying last page of printouts, saving paper and money. A nice guy. 1 interview and 1 follow up fact checking call.
GreenPrint’s Green Prince, Portland Tribune, Nov 14, 2006
Note: This same article turns up in a lot of other search results for papers within the Pamplin Media Group, such as the Tualatin Times.
A stint working at Ford of Europe, where the printers overflowed with superfluous pages, got Hayden Hamilton thinking, then acting. The result: GreenPrint’s application, which detects the unnecessary pages in a print job and alerts users.
Full text
We expect a lot from computers, but sometimes they deliver things we don’t want, like pleas from Nigerian diplomats, offers for discounted hair loss products and that extra page or two of gobbledygook that often comes out when we print.
Most people just shrug off the problem, but for Hayden Hamilton, those excess pages represented an unnecessary waste of money, waste of paper and an opportunity to create entrepreneurial software. Hamilton’s concern led to his just-launched company, GreenPrint.
The concept for GreenPrint emerged when Hamilton, 29, a Portland native, was consulting at Ford of Europe. He says he discovered in Ford’s office “10 print stations with two or three printers each, overflowing with orphaned pages.”
He already had been thinking about paper waste while on a fellowship to study ecotourism in Southeast Asia in 2000 (he has an MBA from Oxford University), where quality paper was scarce.
Expertise in the paperless realm
The scarcity of access to quality health care had been Hamilton’s cause before he turned his attention to overflowing office printers. In 2004, he founded ProgressiveRx.com, offering prescription drugs on the Web at 80 percent to 90 percent below U.S. retail prices through an office in Bangalore, India. The next year he founded the nonprofit Progressive Health Worldwide, which works to supply medical supplies and techonology to African agencies.
About a year ago, he began working with friend James Kellerman, whom he had met at Ford, to acquire investors and develop a beta version of GreenPrint.
For software development they teamed with Aditi Technologies in Bellevue, Wash. Just over half the company budget has come from Hamilton’s own pocket.
The GreenPrint software, Hamilton explains, “works on an algorithm that screens pages for common waste characteristics — a page with only a URL, or the legal jargon after an airline ticket — and highlights the page.”
In plain English that means that after opening a document and hitting the print button, the standard print window opens. After a few clicks to select the program from the printer list, the waste page appears in red. The elimination is confirmed with another click, and the document sent to print without the extra page.
Users can see savings mount
One especially nifty tool that will appeal to techies and environmentalists alike is a waste prevention monitor. It tracks the number of sheets prevented from printing and converts it to money saved (in ink and paper) and — most entertaining — the number of trees saved.
Users can track their individual savings and their company savings overall. Hamilton estimates that “a large organization could save 10-plus trees a day.”
Another function included in the software is a PDF writer similar to Adobe Acrobat. The function provides a one-click way for users to save documents off the Web, such as receipts or articles, as PDF files, which serve as an alternative to printing.
In addition to saving resources, there is the social impact of a program that reminds users of the environment every time they print.
Kim Silva, a foundation specialist at the Outdoor School of Multnomah County, which will be receiving several gift copies of GreenPrint, says, “Not only will the software save paper and printing costs, but it is also a product that fits strongly with the Outdoor School message. We can demonstrate to our students how to conserve.”
Environmental groups American Forests, Arbor Day and the local organization Friends of Trees also have endorsed GreenPrint. Scott Fogerty of Friends of Trees says his group supports the program because it promotes the idea that “green practices make good environmental and economic sense.”
GreenPrint has growth aspirations including a Mac version, a carbon credit program and a map on the GreenPrint Web site that Hamilton hopes will show “where savings are preventing deforestation and how that is reducing greenhouse gases.”
With a company of 10 based in Portland and a number of environmental supporters, Hamilton has another ambition:“We hope to save 1 million trees by the end of 2007.”
On the Web
• www.printgreener.com
• The home version will be $25 for an introductory month, then it will be $35. The enterprise version will be $70. The software only will be available for download via the Web site.
Vital stats
• Number of sheets of paper per year the average U.S. office worker uses: 10,000
• Number of sheets of paper the average tree produces: 8,300
• Percentage of the world’s paper the U.S., with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes: 30
• Percentage of wood pulp that goes toward paper production: more than 40 pecent
Sources: CNN, www.reduce.org