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There are a number of reasons that you might choose to reduce the environmental impact of print, not least because being good to the environment is also good for business!
By reducing the environmental impact of printing and paper-based processes, your company can reduce paper-usage, reduce waste and can reduce costs through savings made with good print management!
There are different ways to approach environmental impact reduction, for example: cultural change and trying to help employees understand how much they’re printing and more importantly, what and why they are printing! Other methods include re-considering the devices you use and tweaking the settings on your current devices to allow more eco-friendly printing.
Managing your output device fleet
By reviewing your output device fleet and putting in place more efficient management practices, you can lower energy consumption, reduce costly re-ordering of consumables and cut down on waste.
Here are three ideas for efficient device management to reduce your environmental impact:
- Implement pull/follow-me printing - this is where jobs at the device are held until a user enters a PIN or swipes a card to claim them. Unclaimed print jobs are usually cleared within a set amount of time.
- Use ENERGY STAR® rated devices and eco-friendly toners - effectively, this is about using more efficient printing equipment.
- Adjust print driver default settings to become more eco and budget-friendly - oddly enough, printers aren’t always set up with the most eco-friendly settings but a bit of tweaking can help.
Cultural Change
Cultural change can be a nightmare depending on how resistant employees are to change, after all, no-one likes change.
In order to combat this, you can try introducing tools like the Print Awareness Tool that actually encourages a change in attitude through gamification.
The Print Awareness Tool uses the principles of 'gamification' to appeal to peoples' competitive instinct and make desired behaviour something they actively want to do. It’s also a great way to reduce print!
As well as introducing tools to help you spread the message internally, another way to drive change to reduce your environmental impact is to distribute digital documents rather than hard-copies when possible. This might apply to meeting agendas, the sharing of documents to read, learning and training materials and generally any documents that are often only used once before going to waste!
A few other tips for reducing environmental impact:
- Recycle used paper
- Use recycled paper and other environmentally-preferable paper
- Don’t print massive email threads - only print the bit you actually need (if you have to print it at all)
- Always use the print preview feature to avoid printing pages you don’t need
Further to all of these ideas is to consider the use of digital document solutions that can help cut out heavy printing processes while also making processes more efficient, more secure and with better visibility.
Remember: Being good to the environment is also good for business
Xenith’s Managed Print Services are focused on managing your output fleet in the most efficient way possible to reduce environmental impact and make significant savings on resourcing. We are committed to helping our clients reduce the environmental impact of working with documents.
