The environmental impact of copy and print in an organisation comprises four components – the impact of the device itself, its energy consumption, its consumables waste and how users use the device.
Organisations are well advised to audit and analyse their current fleet and to optimise it with environmental impact consideration in mind. Particular attention should be given to reducing the energy consumption of the fleet when making changes and even more attention should be given to eliminating avoidable pages. Depleted consumables should be collected and recycled and both users and devices should be continuously monitored to order to increase accountability, reduce page volumes and obtain actual environmental impact data.
Printers and copiers require regular replacement of consumables, for example toner, ink, photoconductors and developers to keep them operative. Over the life of a device a significant amount of depleted consumables can accumulate, sometimes in excess of the size and weight of the device itself.
The environmental impact from producing a single sheet of paper is up to 10 times higher than the impact from printing or copying onto it. Printing or copying two pages of a multi-page document onto both sides of the paper (duplex printing) reduces the total environmental impact by 45%.
Economic considerations have in many organisations led to the deployment of shared printers and copiers. Unfortunate side effects of this approach include the volumes of printed pages users fail to collect or need to reprint because they were accidentally collected by someone else.
Printers and copiers require electricity to operate, and unless an organisation utilises 100% green electricity this electricity usage contributes to the environmental impact. The total number of devices obviously has a considerable impact on the electricity consumption, as does the age and type of devices.
Most modern devices consume less energy than their predecessors and offer technology improvements such as instant start-up from Energy Saver / Sleep Mode.
Single-Function devices typically consume less energy than Multi Function Devices, which should be considered when deploying new devices in locations where mainly printing is required.
Close attention should also be paid to the per-device energy consumption. For example, wide-format (A3) devices consume more energy than narrow-format (A4) devices and high performance devices can consume significantly more energy than smaller devices.
Reducing the total number of devices and streamlining the new devices to actual user needs can significantly reduce the overall energy consumption of a fleet.
We believe that sustainability is important for every business, which is why we encourage all of our customers to participate in our toner cartridge and machine recycling programs. Call us today to find out how your business can get involved.