Centralized printing is a greener office solution

When it comes to IT infrastructure the immediate environmentally focused goals include ensuring that all its PCs, laptops, and servers meet the highest level of energy efficiency and have a minimal number of toxic components. It is planning centralized power management on its PCs, as well as extending the life of PCs from three years to four years to keep them out of the landfills for as long as possible. But what about other waste like the misuse of paper for un-necessary notifications or memos among colleagues. San Francisco wants to cut its paper use in offices by 20 percent as part of its new environmental strategy for the city. One great way to reduce paper waste is the centralization of printing to one printer per floor. Of course this may cause an epic panic if say one printer gets jammed and the entire floor’s print jobs are routed to the other floors. It would be the ultimate logistical nightmare if no one really knew which printer got the job done. San Francisco uses about 215 million sheets of paper per year, spending about $946,000 on paper. That doesn’t account for some of the other expenses involved with printing, such as the ink and the hardware. But the city wants to become more environmentally responsible.

Those workers who believe they don’t print much may still be using a lot of paper. “If you printed out 1% of all e-mails, that would be a tremendous amount of paper. But if the very same task is more cumbersome as queuing up by your office printer than the motive to print unnecessarily goes away.
Source