GreenPrint zaps junk before it hits the printer.

A line of symbols across the top of a white page, a box of overflow formatting, a page of legal jargon you don’t need — these orphaned pages sitting in piles around the printer add up to several thousand trees and even more lost dollars for offices every year.

Twenty-nine-year-old Portland native Hayden Hamilton’s solution is GreenPrint, software that scans documents on the way to the printer, highlights what it deems to be junk pages and allows users to remove them from a print job.

Hamilton says he came up with the idea when he noticed the amount of paper wasted on orphan pages while working at Ford Europe. He built a software team in 2005, selected a Romanian software company to do the blueprints and by December 2006 had a software engineering lab in Chennai, India, building his product. The software went through a beta-testing phase in 2006, and by November the official version 1.0 was available for download from the company’s Web site, www.printgreener.com. The current version — 1.0.7 — reduced the wait time between hitting the print button and seeing the GreenPrint print preview screen,and cut the overall printing time. The latest version also adds a “print to PDF” button to the menu bar of the user’s preferred browser. The software also includes ways to track the carbon dioxide emissions and trees that GreenPrint is saving and the paper waste being created in the user’s office. “An average of six pages per person per day is wasted in the average U.S. office,” says Hamilton, “which adds up to thousands of trees unnecessarily wasted.”

In addition to individual downloads, Staples (Nasdaq: SPLS), Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), and Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) are in discussions with the company about beta-testing GreenPrint on a corporate scale, according to Hamilton.

GreenPrint announced in January that it would plant a tree for every copy of its software downloaded, as part of a campaign it’s calling the Million Tree March.

“If GreenPrint is widely used, it will save tens of millions of trees annually,” Hamilton says. “And the Million Tree March is a good head start.”