Reducing Excess Paper Usage

Reducing your overall negative impact on the environment can begin with a few simple steps. Reducing excess printing from your organization will make a big difference, and it will save your organization money.

Paper Cost Adds Up

On average, office employees consume over 10,000 pages per year each.  This costs companies an average of $15,000 per employee.

Simple Paper Reducing Strategies Include:

Duplex Printing

Duplex Printing is the simplest and most immediate paper and cost cutting strategy to implement. Most multifunction systems and some network printers feature duplex printing and copying that prints on both sides paper. Set you devices default to duplex printing today, and save up to 50% of paper use and cost.

Print Forms on Demand

It is common for businesses to pre-print forms in bulk so that they are ready to use. With Electronic forms technology, forms are ready to print and edit on demand, cutting down overall printing and waste.

Private Printing

Most multifunction systems and some printers have a private printing feature.  This feature holds print jobs at network printers until the user walks up and enters a personal identification number, eliminating “forgotten” print jobs.  If nobody claims the job, it can simply be deleted from the print queue after a certain amount of time.

Use Print Setup and Print Preview

Many print jobs end up including extra pages that might only have one line on the last page, particularly in printed emails or web pages.  Before sending the print job, simply select the pages you want to print.  If you only need the first page, choose to print “current page” only.  If this saved just five pages per employee each day, an office with 100 employees would save 125,000 pages per year.

Don’t Fax, Scan-to-Email Instead

Scan-to-email features on new multifunction systems allow you to send scanned documents as PDF email attachments.  This is an environmentally-friendly alternative to faxing since the document is not automatically printed at the receiving end. The recipients receive the data in a more secure form and decide if it needs to be printed, forwarded, or simple viewed.