My final days of last semester were spent hopping between computer labs. Like others, I had a paper upon which a large percentage of my grade rested. Aside from battling weird formatting that inevitably occurs and being devastated by the M-drive going down, there was concern over print balances.

I have often heard students asking friends and fellow paper-writers to print papers for them because their balances were spent. I oppose paying out of pocket for print money; we should be able to manage printing less.

We receive 25 dollars of print money each semester per student — not including faculty and administrators print jobs, students produce a quarter of a million pages each semester. I don’t know how that compares or really what to compare that to, but it is a lot of paper.

Fortunately, two-sided printing has caught on, thanks to helpful signs in the library. The next step is opting for two pages per side, or not printing certain things at all. Sometimes we are able to read texts from a computer. If this doesn’t hurt my eyes, it puts me to sleep, so I understand not wanting to read from a computer screen.

I am, however, committed to doing this more often. Professors can accept papers printed double-sided and if they are okay with this, encouraging it would make quite a difference. Emailing assignments cuts out hard copies altogether.

This perspective resulted from a discussion on where leftover print balance money goes. If I haven’t exhausted my print balance or haven’t donated it to needy friends, I’d love to allocate it for a specific cause. The opinion board in the Union has had some buzz about composting. It seems fitting to use leftover print money towards an environmentally friendly purpose.

With as much interest in composting as there appeared to be, it could be a very successful project, assuming that there were sufficient funds. We could also donate the odd dollars and cents of extra munch money to composting and recycling projects. Having somewhere to donate my leftover money would curb my urge to find 50 more pages of text to print just to get my money’s worth, and I wouldn’t care as much about spending my last pennies of munch money.

To affirm Ben Noll’s opinion board comment, Eastern Mennonite University has composting, and if we are not better than them we are at least as good as they are.

Lindsay Yoder is a senior nursing major from Perkasie, Pa.