Any business that has worked hard to reduce its carbon footprint will know the challenges of doing so without impacting the bottom line.

The key lies in identifying the least environmentally friendly processes and pieces of equipment within your business and optimising them to reduce both the carbon footprint and overall costs.

For most organisations, the printing environment is a great place to start - but you’ll need some help.

It all starts with the culture and processes

By engaging with a Managed Print Services (MPS) provider, your business can work towards high-quality printing that supports every area of the operation.

MPS providers know where to look, and will identify areas of your print infrastructure which are unnecessarily raising your carbon footprint. A review of the culture and processes in place will likely be their starting point when assessing how big the scope is for raising efficiencies.

For instance, the people within your business might be suffering from poor availability of devices and a print infrastructure that hasn’t been optimised. Expensive, unreliable personal printers will consequently be increasing the ecological impact of the business at no fault of the user.

Similarly, there’s a strong chance you’ll have processes in place that have been embedded over the course of many years, and which needlessly use ink, power and other energy-intensive services to be completed.

With the latest print management software, you can now access reporting tools that enable you to drill down into user and department level printing to see where cost reductions and process improvements can be made.

Plugging the device gap

An MPS provider will usually recommend that those costly and unreliable personal printers are reduced in number and replaced by robust, multi-function devices (MFDs).

This influx of modern, efficient hardware will bring with it features such as ‘follow-me’ printing, which ensures only the people who initiated print jobs can collect them on arrival at the printer via an access card. Beyond the obvious efficiency savings in reducing wasted prints, this also increases security considerably.

Sometimes, the layout of an office might prevent the ability to consolidate multiple printers into fewer MFDs, and in those cases older printers can usually be re-utilised with the same follow-me card access system.

It’s important to find an MPS provider who can assist remotely, too, because if their service package enables remote support, they’ll be able to jump on any device errors and fix them before they become an issue.

Continuing the strategy

Reducing your carbon footprint by engaging with an MPS provider doesn’t stop after the initial round of process and device consolidation - it’s an on-going task that needs plenty of strategy behind it.

Most MPS providers will be keen to assist you with digital transformation, which will further reduce your reliance on printed documentation.

Beyond the implementation of modern print devices, scanning options also need to be considered so that staff can scan paper documents into any digital format they wish and edit, annotate and share them company-wide. And, with such solutions typically costing just one-fifth of the industry standard, there are huge savings to be made.

Travelling employees and remote workers need to be taken into consideration too, because their remote work will also contribute to your organisation’s overall carbon footprint, no matter where they’re located. Thankfully, the latest driver and print management software enables staff to print and scan from any device without having to download additional apps.

The potential carbon and cost savings MPS providers can offer will vary by organisation, but it’s not uncommon to see as much as 30% reduction in overheads and over one-hundred thousand reduced kWh of electricity usage in larger organisations.

If you’re struggling to become a green company, MPS could offer the kick start you need.