Enterprise Green Printing: Why You Need to Start Green Printing

Over the past few years, the green printing movement has captured the attention of companies and government agencies.

Prior to its mainstream adoption, green printing was mainly undertaken by activists and SME’s that were looking to lessen their environmental impact.

Why is everyone so keen to adopt green printing into their business practices and why should you too?

What is green printing?

While there is no exact definition of green printing, it is generally accepted that green printing is when enterprises recycle, reuse, and reduce their print volumes and the amount of resources used.

This can be accomplished through several initiatives:

• Using “treeless” recycled paper, and energy efficient computers
• Recycling excess or waste materials
• Using low-VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) ink, laser toner, and ink cartridges
• Using paperless communications
• Actively educating clients about green printing

Why is green printing important?

Did you know printing has had a profoundly negative impact on the environment?

For example, a single ton of blank white paper needs about three tons of wood and almost 20,000 gallons of water, and creates over 2000 pounds of waste.

The production also requires bleaching and chlorination to make the paper white, stronger, and durable, however this process releases toxins into the water supply.

Implementing green printing is the safer and less damaging alternative, and is much friendlier to the environment.

How you can benefit from green printing

Green printing doesn’t just benefit the environment, it contributes to print cost savings of up to 70%.

It’s important to remember that green printing doesn’t just mean different paper being used, but also how the paper and the equipment are used.

There is a common myth that green printing means using low quality supplies, which creates low quality prints.

However, this couldn’t be further from the truth, many manufacturers provide the same high quality output.

The only major difference is in the costs of recycled products, which are often cheaper than traditionally produced products.

Interested in finding out more about how green printing can help reduce your printing costs? Check out this free whitepaper on considerations for reducing your printing costs!

Enterprise Green Printing

Enterprises can adopt green printing by implementing print solutions into their environment such as secure pull printing and printer profiles.

In addition to improved security, pull printing also helps reduce heavy printing costs by eliminating unnecessary print output, by forcing users only print out what they need.

Organization can reduce paper waste as there are no more accidental print jobs, wasted paper, ink or toner.

Printer Profiles is an innovative utility that enables IT administrators to create profiles per printer or driver.

These profiles can contain a single or group of special settings which can be applied when a user prints using printer profiles, IT admins can create default profiles such as “eco” or “green”.

This profile can have settings with a low DPI, B & W, and duplex to ensure more eco or environmental-friendly printing.

While it is impossible to totally eliminate printing and paper from daily use, green printing presents a viable solution to the problem.

Green printing is not only a step towards environmental responsibility, it is also an effective way to lower costs.