With more businesses leaning towards sustainability in the workplace, you may ask yourself if printing is bad for the environment. You need to position your company as an eco-friendly entity, so it’s important to consider whether printing will impact your carbon footprint.
Printing still has relevance in the workplace and in activities such as:
- Direct mail campaigns
- Printed marketing materials like pamphlets, posters, bulletins, and more
- Educational materials like worksheets and packets at schools
- Internal printed materials for productivity, branding, training, and other purposes
Since you likely won’t be able to eliminate the need for printing within your business, your best course of action is to control printer output. There are several things to look for to promote eco friendly printing, and here are just a few.
The Carbon Footprint Of Printing Paper
Wasting paper can take a hit on not only the planet, but your wallet too. Industries like law and education are big culprits of paper usage, with many printed materials going to waste. Many business leaders cringe at the thought of their money being flushed down the drain with wasted paper and toner, especially as office supply prices soar.
A wasteful aspect of office printing is when print jobs are immediately sent to the machine as soon as they’re added to the queue via the printing network. Oftentimes, staff will forget that they printed something, especially if it is added to a long printing queue. This results in abandoned hard copies stacked in printer trays or on top of the printer, left to be thrown out or recycled eventually.
How to Reduce Waste From Your Business Printer Fleet
You can take a few steps to reduce waste in your everyday printing. For one, you can implement tools to streamline printing while ensuring every print is used effectively. Here are a few resources that help with productivity and waste reduction.
Uniflow Online As A Waste-Reducing Solution
uniFLOWsoftware requires users to actively engage with it to retrieve printed materials. This reduces absent-minded printing and, therefore results in fewer wasted copies. uniFLOW also offers cost recovery and accounting functions, making it easier to track printing costs for your business and the clients for whom you perform services. Read more about uniFLOW in our article What is uniFlOW Online?
Papercut is a similar solution, which will integrate with many different brands of printers. You can use Papercut with or without a print server, and offers similar benefits to uniFLOW including:
- Cost recovery
- Statistics
- Reporting
- Print security
As another great option for making your print environment more eco-friendly, Papercut automatically deletes uncollected print jobs, corrects cost allocation, reroutes print jobs to more efficient devices, and optimizes scan processes
eGoldFax to Revolutionize Eco-Friendly Faxing
eGoldFax is a fax solution that allows you to send and receive digital faxes from any device. This makes it so files can be transferred without automatically printing them, which can save money on unwanted copies. Cost reduction isn’t the only benefit- it can also help your business protect sensitive information to comply with HIPPAA and other regulatory requirements. To learn more about printer security in healthcare, read our blog Is Cybersecurity Really That Big of a Deal In Healthcare? Risks of Healthcare Data Breaches.
This technology emerged after the workforce pushed towards work-from-anywhere capabilities, so staff would not need to go into the office to fax documents. This aspect of a serverless data center is a lot more accessible to remote staff and allows for fewer wasted consumables like paper and toner. Because of this, eGoldFax is great for the environment as well as productivity.
Evaluate Your Printer Fleet For Greener Printing
When you’re trying to reduce waste, it’s crucial to evaluate how updated your printer fleet is. If your printer doesn’t use consumables efficiently, you could be overpaying for materials that just get thrown away or recycled anyway.
Getting a professional print assessment is a great way to evaluate what capabilities you’re missing that could help your business improve productivity and lessen your carbon footprint. Find a sustainable printing company with reps that are familiar with waste-saving technologies and ask them about eco-friendly printing solutions.
