To reduce paper consumption, The ECO-SAFE Foundation offers environmentally friendly printing alternatives for Web site visitors. I recently had a chance to ask ECO-SAFE founder Jason Schultz a few questions about his rapidly expanding program.

1. What is the overall mission of ECO-SAFE?

The mission is to develop and market technologies that help cut down on the volume of paper waste.

2. Your Web site says “We are creating more ECO-SAFE programs, social applications, and web technologies to pursue a greener web. Can you tell us about some of them?

Sure, we have a certified WordPress blog plugin that lets people use the eco-safe delivery methods right from their WordPress powered blog. Also we are finishing up a FireFox extension to give users a button on their browser which will allow them to download, email, or save a PDF version of that given web page. All of the PDF’s generated from the website are dynamic in that they preserve the links, form fields, and other media. This let’s people share the eco-safe PDF and then still interact with the content. We also have other great social networking apps in the works which people can use on their profile pages to allow for eco-safe PDF delivery as well. So, many things in the works.

3. What are the best ways for a Web site or blog to become “Eco-Safe”?

Well, without using our technology they can work on ensuring their CSS and web design is built on the Standards for printing. Some websites don’t do this and when you print them out you see something that looks far different and much longer than the original page! We’ve all tried to print a single page and ended up with 5 pages of junk… If they Do use our technology then they immediately are more eco safe given our special PDF delivery technology and such. It’s by far the fastest and easiest way to give your website users eco safe options.

4. Do you have a sense of the impact your programs have had on the amount of paper used to copy Web pages?

Yes, we have an idea. Since we launched our web service about 4 months ago we’ve had over 2 million eco safe merit badge impressions. You can see the live total of this on our home page.

5. How has the response been to your program over the last year or two? Do any countries stand out in terms of participation?

This current program has only been live for about 4 months now, so it’s still early to say. However, western Europe and South America have been very supportive of the service with the US being the overall most popular.

6. Anything else you’d like to tell us about your project?
Sure, Eco safe was started by Jason Schultz, but couldn’t of happened without the full team of people supporting the project, full bio can be found at www.Jason-Schultz.com.

Also, information about the entire Eco-safe team is available on Eco-Safe.com about us page.