Article brought to you by: Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Conserving on paper means lots of little things

With more and more people "going green," conserving on paper usage is a major concern. The production of paper requires the deforestation of natural resources, as wood is ground to a pulp and natural water resources such as river and lakes being used to dispel acids and chemicals used in this process. Many people are choosing to recycle newspapers and other paper materials, but there are many practical things you can do to cut down on paper usage.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - One simple and convenient way is by making your bills paperless. This can be done by choosing to have all of your bills sent electronically each month, instead of through the mail. Most businesses now offer this option, and you can have all of your bills sent directly to your email address. This will definitely cut down on a lot of unnecessary paper - and if you make payments online or over the phone, this will reduce paper consumption immeasurably..

If you desire a "hard copy" of your monthly bills and expenses, then you should make it a point to use a very small font size and copy and paste all of the bill amounts and important account information onto a blank page. You will have all of the information for your bills on one page that you can then print out. In lieu of having multiple pieces of paper for each bill, you just have one piece of paper with all of your household bills on it.

Another paper-saving tip is not printing until you have the final document that you want. Using print preview before you print a document is really a good idea and helps to prevent against waste. Many will print out a rough draft copy and than throw it away when they are finished making the changes than they wanted.

You can also try printing double-sided documents, which will cut down on the amount of paper that you use as well.

An even better idea is to simply save a list of bills and expensive in a word processing document, and then e-mail it to your private account. This way, you will have a "data cloud" to draw upon at any location where there is a computer with Internet access.

These procedures will also cut down on the amount of mail you have to open on a daily basis. It is also a good way of protecting yourself against fraud. If you are going to be paying your bills electronically, it is important that you take the time to install a virus protection program onto your computer.

It's also a good idea that you use a desktop instead of a laptop that is routed wirelessly.

The bottom line is that you can conserve paper in your own household by just making a few of the very simple changes that are mentioned above.

Article brought to you by: Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)