Does cloud printing shrink your carbon footprint?
It’s a big question with a layered answer. Broadly speaking, the answer is yes. While cloud adoption isn’t a magic wand for sustainability, it’s a powerful tool in your environmental toolbox.
To truly reduce emissions, businesses must look at everything from procurement to energy investments. Cloud printing helps by providing the framework for a more efficient workplace. In this guide, we’ll explore how shifting to the cloud can help your school or business meet its sustainability goals.
The environmental impact of traditional printing
Traditional on-site printing has a massive environmental cost. Approximately 85 million tons of paper are produced for printing every year. That’s about 4 billion trees-worth, annually.
Printing isn’t a particularly sustainable enterprise, which is why (here at PaperCut) we’re actually working hard to help our customers print less.
Cloud printing won’t solve every issue; it still requires paper, ink, and toner. However, it helps our society reduce print demand and use energy more efficiently. It’s the first step toward a moresustainable print sector.
How cloud print shrinks your footprint
There are a bunch of ways that cloud printing can help with carbon footprint reduction in workplaces without existing print management software:
Reducing paper waste
Cloud printing encourages a paperless approach by allowing you to store documents digitally and print only when really truly necessary. It also reduces printer errors, which means fewer duplicate jobs and less paper in the (recycling) bin.
Energy efficiency
We’re going to dive deeper into energy stats below, but here are the cliffnotes: By moving print resources to the cloud, organizations can ditch traditional, power-hungry print servers. Cloud-based printing services can also be optimized for energy efficiency, further shrinking your carbon footprint.
Reducing hardware and e-waste
Fewer physical servers on-site means less manufacturing, fewer transport emissions, and reduced maintenance needs, while device lifespans are also extended because you can easily update drivers and software over the cloud.
Every part of this helps significantly cut down the amount of printer e-waste your organization produces.
Improving user behavior
Cloud print management gives your IT managers and sysadmins unparalleled control over your print environment. Why is that a good thing for sustainability? Because it allows you to track printer errors and wasted paper, while cutting down on unnecessary printing by implementing stuff like individual print quotas.
Remote printing
Don’t forget the flow-on effects of remote printing, either. With your staff able to collaborate and print from home, via the cloud, you’re removing the need for the physical transportation of documents, or even commuting.
The numbers back this up. Studies have already shown that remote workers have a 54% lower carbon footprint than on-site employees.
Data centers and energy consumption
There’s no getting around it: cloud data centers chew up a lot of energy. Like seriously, a lot. Data centers and data transmission networks account for about 1% of all greenhouse gas emissions (some estimate that number to be even higher). It’s a bigger carbon footprint than the airline industry.
So, you can see it’s not as simple as ‘traditional printing bad, cloud printing good’.
The real question is about efficiency. Is it better for multiple organizations to pool resources in a single, optimized cloud server? Most experts say yes. Scalable cloud infrastructure is generally more efficient than running hundreds of separate, unoptimized on-site servers.
In fact, Microsoft reckons general cloud migration can shrink your carbon footprint by up to 98%.
It’s hard to find independent stats on how much energy you’re likely to save with cloud printing (it’ll depend on a bunch of factors, like your cloud provider, print load, business needs, energy providers etc.) but the general consensus is that scalable cloud infrastructure is more efficient, footprint-wise.
Integrating cloud print into your ESG goals
To accurately measure the impact of cloud printing, you need a clear sustainability strategy. Start with an initial print audit to understand your current behaviors and costs. Knowing your current error rates and ink usage will help you set meaningful targets.
Adopting the right cloud solution
Chat to an MPS provider about the best cloud printing solutions for your business.
It might be a self-hosted service, like PaperCut MF, which is ideal for private cloud deployments. Or something cloud-native, like PaperCut Hive, which is more suited to multi-tenant SaaS. Both allow you to generate reports that track paper usage and overall costs over time.
By regularly reviewing your activity, you’ll find new ways to reduce waste. The trick is to keep your metrics simple and transparent – moving toward acircular economy starts with optimizing the resources you already have.
Printing and the circular economy
The circular economy is basically an economic model designed to minimize waste and make the most of your resources. That’s a pretty bare-bones definition, but it fits. By extending your printer lifespans, and reducing paper and e-waste, cloud printing is a great way to start implement circular principals within your organization.
Printing is traditionally seen as a wasteful exercise: from manufacture and paper to waste and energy consumption. But by optimizing your cloud performance and energy use, by centralizing your resources and adopting a more paperless approach, by recycling wherever you can, you’re going a long way to making your print room more circular.
Talk to our friendly team to find out how PaperCut can help you shrink your carbon footprint.
