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.




