As societies move to creating a more sustainable future, many workplaces and businesses are stepping up to reduce their impact on the planet, including changing work practices to reduce their environmental harm.
We’re unlikely to become a paperless society anytime soon, which makes printing a key business workflow that can be optimized to become more sustainable.
Trees play many parts in benefitting our climate and planet, but with one mature tree absorbing more than 48 lbs of CO2 each year , deforestation has a massive effect on climate change.
As an individual, you can help your workplace make better choices – whether you’re creating policies to minimize paper consumption, or ensuring paper waste is properly recycled.
Printing can have a larger impact not only on paper waste, but cost too – excessive printing can burn through paper, ink, toner, and electricity. PaperCut was literally founded on the hope of reducing print waste as much as possible in schools and workplaces!
Here’s a quick and easy guide for how your organization can work to adopt environmentally friendly printing:
Is recycled paper eco-friendly?
30% of trees cut down are pulped into paper products. Print industry consumers feel this responsibility and are already voting green with their wallets. Quocirca reports that 50% of customers expect their print supplier to help them reduce their environmental impact.
In just one year, the average office worker uses roughly 50 kg of paper, equivalent to 10,000 sheets of A4. As jaw-dropping as that number is, it also means there’s an opportunity to save thousands of sheets through small changes.
Choosing to purchase recycled paper and other products helps support a circular economy. By switching to recycled paper, your organization is helping to:
- Close the loop since waste gets repurposed into other products
- Reduce greenhouse gas emissions in lumber and paper production
- Reduce global demand for wood, which reduces deforestation
Not to mention, recycled paper uses fewer chemicals , less packaging, and fewer resources than paper from virgin fiber.
It’s important to know that not all recycled paper is as ‘green’ as it says on the package, with a limited amount of times each piece can be recycled due to their fibers.
Somewhere down the line, virgin paper fibers get added to recycled paper manufacturing, but it’s still a greener choice than the alternative.
Energy-efficient multi-functional printers
Multifunctional printers or devices (MFPs/MFDs), make managing documents easy. Surprisingly, they can also make eco-friendly printing easy, combining the need for multiple devices into one and allowing you to print, scan, fax and photocopy, and save energy.
MFD’s help the environment in a number of ways when you select the right one by following these tips:
- Check the device’s Energy Rating Label to get an idea of its energy efficiency. The greater the efficiency, the less harm on the planet.
- Find an MFD with the lowest possible consumption rate to minimize the waste and expenses associated with replacement cartridges.
- Integrate print management software to access analytics that reveal ways to streamline printing and give the device some downtime.
If your Managed Print Services (MPS) lease isn’t up for renewal any time soon, and purchasing energy-efficient MFDs isn’t attainable in the near future, that’s okay.
There are other ways to reduce the environmental impact of your organization’s printing.
What other sustainable printing options could you put in place?
Switching virgin fiber paper for recycled and implementing energy-efficient MFDs are the basics of eco-friendly printing. But what else can you do to be more sustainable? The answer is print management software .
1. Longer MFD lifespans
PaperCut’s vendor-agnostic software allows easy printing from any platform or device, so you can get the maximum life out of your existing devices (which also helps your budgets!).
2. Set savvier printing habits
By setting eco-friendly print policies through your software you can nudge end-users towards better behavior and considerate printing. Even something as small as setting default printing to double sided (or duplex) prints can drastically reduce how much paper you use!
3. Keep improving bit by bit
Actionable reports give complete visibility into print insights to reveal how much you’re printing, and in a way that you can share with your teams to encourage them to take accountability and reduce or reconsider their own printing where possible.
Wherever you are on your journey toward sustainability, you’re on the right path – every small action creates an impact, and as a business or school, the scale of each change you make can be great.
Reduce waste + plant trees = Forest Positive
The Forest Positive movement is an extension of sustainability initiatives looking beyond waste reduction and carbon-neutral targets and instead focusing on benefitting global trees and forests.
It’s a sustainability approach that offers more than balancing carbon footprints and greenwashing, instead asking for active and ongoing investment, preservation, and conservation of our natural ecosystem.
Print management’s role in sustainability
Sustainability is an upward trend in the print industry. Many dedicated organizations like Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) , HP , Konica Minolta , Kyocera , and Ricoh , are doing amazing work in the sustainable print space.
PaperCut’s print management solutions have been helping over 115 million users across 195 countries to reduce paper waste for over 25 years. Since 2020, for every license we’ve sold, Carbon Positive Australia has planted a tree in one of its reforestation projects.
If your business wants to do more to help the environment, they can through PaperCut Grows – we’ve partnered with One Tree Planted for an opt-in sustainability program available through PaperCut MF and PaperCut Hive.
PaperCut Grows is an easy-to-use in-product tool that calculates and converts your number of printed documents into trees planted globally, via a small up-front investment per printer.
Ready to take control of your print waste?
Whether you’re looking for a print solution that plants trees on your behalf or just one that can help you reduce how much your business is printing day-to-day, PaperCut is here to help.
Fill out the below form to speak to one of our friendly team who will help you choose the best print solution for your current state and future sustainability goals.
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