How to reduce your paper usage?
Printing can be expensive, from the cost of paper and ink to the actual printer. Reducing your paper usage doesn’t only help the environment but also can save you and your business a lot of money. There are a range of things that you can do in order to reduce the amount of paper that you use, from thinking about whether what you are about to print is worth it to using advanced technology.
1. Ask the question – do I really need to print this?
One of the quickest and easiest ways to save paper is to really think before you print, do you actually need to print out the page or is it just a waste? Don’t print pages with one sentence on or unnecessary copies of documents. If the document does need to be printed then consider making the font smaller or using thinner margins which can reduce the number of overall pages used.
2. Duplex Printing
You should also consider using duplex printing when you can. Printing on both sides of the paper reduces your paper usage by 50%. You can either set print drivers to duplex printing as the default or hard code the printers to print duplex. Printing on both sides may not be the answer to all of your printing needs but for the majority of print jobs, using both sides is fine. Duplex printing can also be set as a rule.
3. Centralise Printing
Instead of having a printer at every desk, a centrally- located printer makes printing less convenient which in turns forces people to think about whether they really need to print. Pull printing can also help save paper as people have to physically go to the printer to print their work. Any documents on the schedule can be purged after 24 hours if they aren’t printed by the person within that time.
4. Go Digital
A great way to reduce paper usage is to go digital. A digital environment uses no paper at all, so by going digital and reserving printing for essential use a lot of paper can be saved. Cloud based services like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive allow for digital organisation and storage of documents, which negates the need for hard copies. They can allow different users to access documents which eliminates the need to print as many of them. Digitising some documents can help reduce waste exponentially.
5. Rule Based Printing
Rule based printing can be set by user, document type and even programme. With rule based printing you can configure specific restrictions governing the printing of certain document types, such as websites which require a lot of paper when printed. There are also eco-friendly policies such as automatic duplex printing which can be set as default to stop wasteful single sided paper usage.
6. Quotas and Rules
Quotas and rules do not mean stopping people printing all together. They allow you to set daily/weekly/monthly quotas by user.