Most organizations simply have no idea how much they print and how much it's costing them!

I'm about six months of Sundays away from completing the manuscript for a book I'm writing on print management that carries the working title of "EcoWise Printing: Gaining the Full Value of Printing in a Responsible Manner".

In the meantime, I thought I would take this opportunity, and perhaps a few others to follow, to share some thoughts related to the primary goal of my effort, which is to create awareness about the costs of printing–both financial and environmental–and offer some prescriptive guidance on how to reduce both.

Although I'm seeing signs of a growing awareness of the print cost problem, most organizations simply don't know how much they print or what their print-related costs all add up to.

In addition, the management of print is still typically decentralized in many firms, thus adding further to the print volume and cost measurement challenge; and even those who have it centralized often have difficulty keeping it that way because the start-up cost is so low for printing. Printers are now so cheap that a department manager or an end user can simply go to the nearest office supplies store to buy one, and the cost may go unrecorded because it's just one of many items consolidated on someone's expense reimbursement submission. Thus the cost may never seen by those interested in profiling the entire print environment.

However, it's not the start-up cost that gets you–it only represents about 5% to 10% of what you ultimately end up paying in total when you factor in the ongoing cost of consumables such as toner cartridges and paper. This is where the real cost and environmental impact stems from, but these items, too, can be bought by individual users at retail, and the costs also go unrecorded.

As a result of these and other factors, an IT manager may know about his/her capital budget for printers and the cost of whatever maintenance contracts are in place, but not be aware of how much is being spent on personal printers and on supplies and thus not know the true total cost of print for his/her organization.

In my next posting, I'll comment on why people print and why print volumes are going up rather than down–so much for the 'paperless office'!

do tree farms make a difference?

If you’re like most people, you believe that the planting of new trees helps offset losses due to logging. In some ways it does. There are now farms, called mono-culture tree plantations, that grow trees specifically for paper production, but unfortunately these farms are not a perfect solution.

First of all, they don’t contain the same biodiversity and range of habitats that natural forests do. As well, many of them have been established in places that used to be natural forests. In southeastern USA 75% of them occur on the site of former natural forests and wetlands.

In fact, these tree farms are the leading cause of lost wetlands in that area. By replacing natural forest and wetlands with tree farms, we greatly impact the natural ecosystem. The loss of forest as habitat leads to species endangerment. The indigenous variety of plants and animals has been disturbed and modified. The water and soil quality are both lower.

Can the soil fully replenish without the enormous variety of rotting plants, wildlife droppings and munching organisms? If not, it won’t be long before that land can’t sustain the growth of those “paper” trees any longer.

Paper will always have an important place in society: let's be sure to use it responsibly - Remember to EcoPrint!

Remember to ecoprint

Next time you are wondering if you should really print that document, remember this:

The United States prints 2 trillion pages of office copy annually. If we lay the paper out length-wise, this equates to;
•727 return trips to moon
•5 return trips to Mars
•4.6‘ thick wall of paper around the circumference of the earth

If we consider the world’s copy print of 9 trillion pages – we have;
•3271 return trips to moon
•23 return trips to Mars
•21‘ thick wall of paper around the circumference of the earth

How much resource can be consumed by paper?

In the USA, 4.6 million tonnes of paper consumed annually for office copy. Consider that making, using and disposing of that amount of paper:
• required enough wood to build more than 1 million average homes,
• used the same amount of water as flows over Niagara Falls in one full day,
• required more energy than is used in all the households in Los Angeles for a full year, and
• generated more than 5 million tonnes of solid waste and greenhouse gas emissions.
The point of this is not to say that copying and printing are terrible, shameful things we must never do. The goal is to drive home the fact that reducing your printing means both financial benefits to your company as well as environmental benefits for everyone.

Combining corporate results and the environment

In these days of global warming and economic instability, company managers have to choose on too many issues between greater revenue and “greater good”. It’s refreshing if not downright thrilling to realize that cutting your print costs can be beneficial to not just your bottom line but also to the planet’s. Taking the time to assess just how much your company prints and minimizing that amount will save money, yes, and will help the environment on so many different levels. A look at the existing situation and the environmental “costs” involved can help to pain a clearer picture.

How much do we print

There is a huge volume of printing done in the modern office. In the U.S. in 2006, 2,000,000,000,000 (trillion) pages were printed or copied for office use.  The advent of technology was supposed to herald the arrival of the “paperless office”. Unfortunately, that has not materialized at all, for two reasons.

1. It has become much easier to print
2. There is a flood of information at our fingertips

The combination of those two factors has lead to an explosion in the generation of printed documents. For whatever reasons, seeing information on screen isn’t sufficient — we want it on paper in our hands. Or we want a paper record – requiring storage, filing, searching – accessing when needed.