Printing and the Environment

As organisations in Sweden look for more ways of reducing their environmental impact, Green IT seems to be a major area of interest. The Kammarkollegiet (gov think tank) recently commissioned Naturvårdsverket (EPA) to develop a proposal for a Green IT environment action plan for the public sector.However when reviewing available reports from their recent web presentation, office printing seems to be very low on their priorities which is strange if you consider the data below.

According to research from InfoTrends, 779 billion sheets of paper were used in homes and offices across Western Europe in 2008. HP estimates that 53 trillion pages will be printed worldwide in 2010 alone.

Gartner, IDC, Xerox, Lexmark, etc estimate that the average office worker (banks, government, Lawyers, accountants, Insurance) print around 10 000 pages per year.

Of these 10 000 pages, only around 40% actually leave the office (are sent to clients) IDC report. The remaining 60% or 6000 pages per person per year are either filed (15% to 20%) or thrown away.

But what is the expected annual environmental and financial impact of printing in a typical organisation with 1000 computer users?

• Paper consumed ....................10 000 000 sheets
• Toner cartridges consumed ..............1 000 cartridges
• Printers used ............................330 units
• Water consumed  ....................3 405 000 litres
• CO2 generated  ...........................6,4 Tonnes
• Electricity used ) ...................610 000 Kw
• Oil  ...................................3 500 litres of Oil
• Estimated annual financial cost .   3 400 000 Kr

Then there is the cost of recycling all that paper. How much is reused, burned or dumped? And of course the transportation costs in delivering and removing it. Now if we do this calculation for the entire office workforce of Sweden the figures would be frightening!

Where are the savings?

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Using modern print solutions it is now possible to reduce this cost, both Financial and Environmental, however many of the solutions that are being looked at by companies (and recommended by manufacturers) will reduce the financial cost but will NOT reduce the environmental cost.

Some solutions will reduce the Environmental cost but at the expense of forcing companies into only being able to use one manufacturer’s printers across the company and this normally increasing their hardware cost. Other so called solutions that many environmental sites and environmental groups recommend just won’t work in a modern office environment without major changes to the way people work and their habits, which is both expensive, time consuming and always fails.

To be able to implement a print solution that offers both Financial and Environmental savings is actually not difficult. It does however require you know where your major financial and environmental costs are and how to reduce them without impacting your business processes or locking yourself into a path that in the long term may not suit your business.

Looking at print there are three main elements that effect cost and pollution.

•  The physical printing device.
•  The paper used to print on.
•  The toner used to place text and images on the paper.

All three cost money and cause pollution.

To understand the potential financial and environmental savings per 1000 employees per year, here is an example of what could be saved by applying solutions to your print infrastructure.

Paper pages saved ..........................1 500 000     or 15%

Toner cartridges not bought...................... 370     or 37%

Printers used ................................... 330     or  0%

Water saved ................................. 510 000 ltr or 15%

CO2 saved ....................................... 1.6 Tonnes 34%

Electricity saved............................ 100 000 Kw  or 14%

Oil saved ..................................... 1 290 Ltr or 37%

Estimated annual financial savings......... 1 521 000 Kr  or 45%

When focused on, it is easy to see that print is a huge problem and as such offers a huge opportunity to recover costs and reduce environmental damage. Print needs to be pushed onto the radar of large organisations and take its place as major polluter in the office space. It should be a significant part of Sweden’s future Green IT strategy.

It can not be left up to the printer manufacturers to develop solutions. Despite what they say they may not have the environment as their top priority.