How Firms Can Tackle Paper Mountains

摘要

Printers gets a rough ride when it comes to making business processes more environmentally friendly. It is not the most wasteful area, but it is the most conspicuous. IDC estimates that 60 trillion pages a year are printed worldwide and that the average business wastes 88 million sheets. Kyocera Mita conducted research in 2008 into employees' engagement with environmental issues. The study investigated how much workplace printing was unnecessary. Tracey Rawling Church, marketing director for Kyocera Mita, says there is some misunderstanding over what users can do to reduce waste. "A lot of things are done that result in paper being wasted. For example, printing an e-mail just to read it. People think that putting paper in the recycling tray completely mitigates this, but it does not." Her view is shared by Alan McLeish, senior product marketing manager for Oki Printing Solutions. He says, "If you make it a policy not to print e-mails unless there are exceptional circumstances, it will save a huge amount of paper. "When it is necessary to print e-mails, we encourage people to print in mono so that they use less consumables. With e-mails there is often one page of information and sometimes four or five pages of extraneous information."