Create a Greener, Manageable, Secure Print Infrastructure

Printing and the Environment: How to be Greener

About 50 per cent of IT's carbon footprint is generated by the office. Much can be done to reduce this without breaking the bank. Output Optimisation is an area where considerable financial and energy savings could be made.

Colm Feighoney, a green IT consultant with IBM Global Services, says: "Many of the organisations I come across have far more printers than they ever imagined because an individual department can nip along to PC World and buy an inkjet with no consideration for the total cost of ownership. These things aren't even network-attached so they can't be managed properly."

Printers and copiers sit idle, consuming power. Combining printer, copier, fax and scanner in one device will save a considerable amount of standby energy. According to Toshiba, a copier, two printers and a fax machine consume on average 1400kWh of energy each year, while a multifunction machine uses around 700kWh.

Even without a multifunction device, simply imposing a new printing regime can reduce the environmental burden. "You can have printers set to mono as default and have colour as the exception. Double-sided, draft quality - for most users it probably doesn't make a lot of difference," adds Feighoney. A 50-person office could save £3,000 per year through double-sided printing, according to a leading print manufacturer.

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Source: www.silicon.com

Take control of your output

Print management is becoming more of a concern inmid-size and large organisations. Today's printer infrastructures exhibit many of the characteristics of unmanaged PC assets; there is no current information about what equipment is owned, where it is located or who is using it. There is also no centralised record of when the equipment went into service and no easily accessible record of the purchase cost or relevant service contracts.

In some ways, the problem is worse than it ever was with PCs because organisations have, for too long, failed to manage their printer assets actively. This is because printing is often perceived as a low-level concern compared with other IT issues.

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Source: www.itweek.co.uk

UK wastes £1bn on printing

More than £1bn a year is wasted across UK government and industry through inefficient business printing, according to an economic impact study released by OKI Printing Solutions

The findings reveal that a staggering £16.7bn is spent annually in the UK on printing which is equivalent to the GDP of Cuba. The scale of waste is so great that leading economists believe it is hampering business growth, reducing productivity and damaging the UK's economy.

Among the worst offenders for wasting resources through printing are the education and public administration sectors, which lose around £225m a year through excessive outsourcing and poor internal print management. This figure represents almost a quarter of the £1bn chancellor Gordon Brown hopes to raise through recent increases in air travel taxes.

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Source: www.computing.co.uk