Sustainability and Printing

Printing and Sustainability – Mutually Exclusive?

These days you’d be hard-pressed not to find someone in the upper tiers of management not concerned with sustainability. Either from an ethical point of view, as in it’s the right thing to do or a strictly financial – reducing waste is good for the bottom line.

You may not have thought about it, but printing can consume a lot of resources – financial and natural. With a quick Google search, the consensus seems to be that the average employee prints about 10K pages per year, costing somewhere around $700 and using up a little over three per year! In addition, for each print server you have, the cost is somewhere around $4000 per year to maintain that and on average, could consume 7500 kWh per year.

So, what can be done about it?

I’m glad you asked. If print servers take up electricity and money, let’s get rid of them. Of course, what will we replace them with? My recommendation is to find yourself a Printing Management Solution that allows you to do just that. The most common way would be to ingest the information on the details of your printer setup (i.e., Printer Name, type, IP addresses, etc.) from your print server(s). This solution would then take care of giving your end-users the correct printer drivers and directing the print traffic to the correct IP Addresses for your printers.

What about the per-employee cost?

The simplest way to reduce employee printing costs would be to get them to print less. However, even though the demise of paper has been talked about for a long time, it is still here. Let’s reduce paper waste, then. Another quick search gives results in the 20%-30% range for paper waste. This often is from print jobs never picked up and from print jobs accidentally intercepted and then reprinted.

If there was a way to not have the job print until you were at the Multi-Function Device (MFD), you wouldn’t have so much waste. With Secure Release, you can simply print your job to a Universal Print Queue and the job is held for you until you get to the MFD. At this point, you can use one of several methods (entering a PIN, scanning an ID Badge, or using your Mobile Phone for the release of your print job.

Other Benefits

Both solutions have one thing in common: security. Getting rid of Windows print servers means getting rid of things like the recent Print Nightmare Spooler Vulnerability. And with Secure release, your job is sent to and from the cloud as a 256 Bit encrypted PDF file. The job is only printed when you arrive at the printer, so no one else can see it or grab it before you can.

Summary

To wrap it up – using a Cloud Printing Management Solution will not only increase sustainability, but it will help save your company money too. We’d like to help you out.

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