5 Printing Tips You Can Use Today

Most offices waste a lot of money, toner, and time with their printing. We try to save our clients money (by being consistantly priced at %10-15 lower than major office supply stores) and help them print greener (less waste, energy, and printing emmissions). So, here are five printing tips you can use today to begin saving money now.

1. Run longer printing/copying jobs whenever possible. This will save you toner, energy, and prolong the life of your color imaging unit if you’re printing in color.

2. Print with your largest printer. If your office prints most jobs on larger laser printers, you will save hundreds in monthy costs compared to small inkjets. Unless you print under 100 pages per month, you shouldn’t have an inkjet in your office due to the high cost per print (average is $.11 cpp compared to $.03 cpp for laser printers).

3. Set your default mode to print in “Draft” for black and white. Most monochrome documents can be printed in draft mode, and it will prolong your toner life.

4. Buy high-quality compatible cartridges unless you need graphic design quality color prints. Compatible cartridges can save you generally around 25-35 percent per cartridge. This is especially attractive in color printing. Make sure you are buying compatible cartridges that are fully warrantied and STMC/ISO9001:2000 certified. If you’ve bought cheap toner before, you know it hurts your bottom line.

5. Print a black and white test page before you print in color. This will help you figure out design issues without wasting color toner.

We do managed print solutions as well (a full diagnostic run-down of your current printing, and alternative plans to help you save money). Give us a call at Pahoda Image Products, and ask about a free analysis of your current printing situation.

Green Printing in Denver

I’ve been writing a lot of articles on how to print green here in the Mile High City. A lot of people are extremely interested in being more green in their everyday lives, but the transition to being greener in ALL parts of our existence can be difficult. Let me give a personal example:

I recently stopped drinking bottled water completely. I like bottled water. It is convenient, guaranteed to meet minimum health standards, easy to transport, and it’s a breeze to recycle the bottles. However, I started thinking about how much unnecessary waste I was generating due to my love of convenience. I tallied up how much water I like to drink per day (about 4 bottles). At $.06 per bottle (for the least expensive brand I like), it penciled out to over $87 dollars per year. For $50 I was able to buy a water-filter pitcher and two filter cartridges, which enable me to purify twice the amount of water. It is greener, and it costs me less than half to drink a similar standard of water. Generally, being green in your printing, and being green in your life are like this. It may take one little extra step, but it will almost always save you money!

When you are printing, a few steps like this can help you reduce energy costs, print green, and save you money on printing. One simple tip is printing in batches: it 1) reduces start up energy 2) saves your color imaging unit (see blog post), 3) reduces toner usage (depending on the machine). By planning just a little, you can save substantially over the long-haul. We have a lot of green printing tips…we love helping people save money AND the earth! Give us a call for quotes on toner and a free print-use analysis.

Printing Green Helps Your Bottom Line

Green Printing Denver

I was thinking this afternoon about business and environmental responsibility. Why it is people are so resistant to “being green?” The problem, I concluded, is that most business people who think this way (from any generation) equate being “environmental” with being extreme or expensive. So, I’m making it my mission to convince people that being green (at least in their printing) actually SAVES money and doesn’t require you to stop shaving or live in trees!

While taking more extreme measures to minimize your impact on the earth is noble, I completely realize most people aren’t going to do it unless it’s painless. So, what I have been doing (and am going to continue doing) is giving you ways to save money AND help minimize your impact on our landfills and petroleum reserves. Here are some examples so far:

1. By printing with the most efficient printers, you reduce your cost per print (see some of my Xerox Phaser series articles) and use of petroleum based products, which saves you money.

2. By doing more duplex printing, you save paper…you got it, AND money.

3. By switching from OEM HP cartidges to SoyPrint compatibles, you save several pounds of petrolum based toner, AND around 20% on the cost.

4. By maximizing your work flow use to the most efficient printer, you save energy, toner, AND money!

You get the idea. Being green isn’t expensive, it’s not any more time consuming, and it will actually help you profit. In addition to the benefits I’ve just mentioned, you are able to feel good about doing something for future generations (here and abroad). You will be saving energy costs, and reducing our nation’s dependance on foreign oil. It just makes sense. Feel free to pass this article around…the more people understand being green is profitable, the more likely they are to try it. Feel free to call me about printing green!

SoyPrint Article from Idiana Soybean Alliance

Here’s an article from the Indiana Soybean Alliance web site about their partnership with SoyPrint. There is a lot of excitement here in Denver (and the printing community overall) about this new product. We here at Pahoda Image Products recently became distributors of SoyPrint cartridges here in Denver! I boldfaced the type on Rick’s statement at the end of the article. His points are extremely important, and they make so much sense for the hesitant buyer. Even the most staunch anti-environmentalist can’t help but be impressed by the localism of the product. It’s made here in the US (for HP and Cannon brand printers), so all manufacturing must be at least up to our environmental standards! Enjoy:

–Everyone can print black, but now consumers can make the choice to print green. SoyPrint is an environmentally-friendly, soy-based printer toner cartridge that is making its way into the marketplace thanks in part to funding from the Indiana Soybean Alliance’s (ISA) Indiana New Ventures and Enterprises in Soy Technology (INVEST) program.

“The award of this grant, and the creation of the INVEST program itself, speak volumes about ISA’s leadership and ingenuity in the industry,” said Rick Greenlaw, vice president of SoyPrint. “Once again, it has been on the forefront, introducing another soy-based product, the first of its kind anywhere in the world.”

SoyPrint is a soy-based toner cartridge, brought to the market by PRC Technologies, for use with home or office personal-use laser printers. An environmental breakthrough in office printing for businesses, schools and colleges, this is the first company to offer laser printer cartridges using toner powder derived from soybeans.

“Indiana’s soybean farmers are excited to support the development of products like SoyPrint with our checkoff dollars,” said Jerry Osterholt, ISA director and farmer from Roanoke, Ind., who participated in reviewing INVEST applications. “Products like this are critical to our future, not only because they are a new use for soybeans, but because they are ecologically smart products that help protect the environment for all of us.”

Although soy ink has been available for some time, this is the first time a soy-based option has been available for laser cartridges. And according to PRC, the print quality and page yield matches that of name-brand cartridges. Pricing is also similar to a brand name laser cartridge found in an office supply store.

“Making the toner for one (traditional) cartridge requires two to three liters of oil,” Greenlaw said. “SoyPrint cartridges use soybean oil to produce that toner instead of petroleum. One hundred million cartridges are used in the U.S. alone each year, or 200 to 300 million liters of oil.”

“Environmentally, unlike most brand name models, SoyPrint is assembled in the U.S., and thus the fuel usage to bring it to the consumer is less. Many name brand models are made overseas,” added Greenlaw. “Our recycled cartridge saves three to five pounds of plastic made from oil, and we arrange for the empty cartridge to be recycled, saving another three to five pounds of plastic from landfills.”

Print Green By Consolidating

I was thinking about how we can print greener this weekend. As I was brainstorming over a cup of black coffee, I thought of something I have briefly mentioned before: saving toner on your printing by adjusting work-flow. I have mentioned overbuying and under-buying equipment for your office’s needs, but I want to give you some practical tips on saving your green and helping the earth.

First, monitoring your ppm (pages per month) is extremely important for each machine. Also, the fewer machines you have, generally, the better. I was working with an industrial office last week that had almost one printer per employee. They were smaller desktop printers for an office that does minimal printing. They weren’t a telephone call center, where having individual printers may be a necessity. So, I wondered, why do they have so many printers?

The environmental impact of printing is much more when you consider that each small petroleum-based plastic cartridge only carries the toner for 400-500 pages. Buying a cartridge roughly 3 times in size would produce 10-20 times the prints. That’s a lot of extra plastic for an office of small printers! What I recommended for this office was consolidating their printing to 1 or 2 printing locations. It would help with green printing in several ways:

1. It would reduce the number of prints (people are more careful about what the print if they have to walk to get it).

2. It would reduce the volume of plastic in used cartridges (by consolidating to larger machines).

3. It would allow the office to purchase soy toner (generally available for larger machines only) if they wanted.

4. It would reduce the plastic used to manufacture each desk-top machine.

5. It would lower the cost per print for the office as a whole, and the machines could be donated to small non-profits who could use them for their light printing needs (which would also provide the office with a tax break!).

This is a small example of how you can help your office become greener without doing damage to your bottom line. The larger machines will generally pay for themselves in less than 6 months. And you can feel better about saving the environment and your money! Feel free to call us for your soy toner needs, your work-flow analysis, and your high-quality compatibles.

HP Compatible Soy Printing

We are just getting our green partnership started here in Denver with SoyPrint products. It’s exciting to carry products that assist our customers being green (without making it brutally expensive!). SoyPrint’s cartridges are designed primarily for the business or school using HP OEM cartridges. They are more expensive than compatibles, so if price is your determining factor, you’ll probably want to look at our compatibles. If you still want to be green in your printing and you do a fair amount, buying the HP X cartridges saves plastic by putting more toner in a similar cartridge.

Here’s a Denver Post article about soy printing if it’s something you find yourself interested in:

http://www.denverpost.com/technology/ci_12199498

It’s a pretty fair piece on the subject, and it’s cool to see Denver interested in more sustainable printing practices. If you’re on the fence with soy printing, it’s a good idea to do your own research. It’s funny being in sales, because people don’t believe something unless they have read it online first. It’s so much easier selling to knowledgeable customers. Most of what this blog is about is giving Denver IT and business people information about green printing, the toner industry, and getting the most pages per-dollar. If someone knows general price lists, how work-flow, and printer-cost optimization work, it makes my job easy! I hope you’re enjoying these posts, and as always, give us a call if you are interested in green printing!