Saturday, April 25, 2015

Why Having Green Printing Policies is Better for Your Business, as Well as the Environment


While we live in an age where we tend to have a number of paper free options for reading things and showing them to people, sometimes only a hard copy will do. While most companies and individuals have already dramatically reduced the amount they print compared with 15 or even five years ago, due to things like electronic cloud based document archives and document viewing facilities on smartphones and tablets, printing can still be a substantial overhead for many people. Additionally, of course, where resources get used, there is an environmental cost, even when you print on sustainable, recycled paper.

Why Consider Greener Printing?

With many customers now very concerned about the green credentials of the companies they choose to give their money to, anything you do that can improve your ability to say you are an environmentally friendly business is a good thing. More than that though, when it comes to printing, choosing the greener options is actually cheaper. Printing supplies are necessary, but as well as getting a good deal on them by sourcing them from a company likeusaprinterguy.com who offer good value, you also need to make sure you aren't wasting anything.

Change Company Policy to Print More Economically

If you want to save significant amounts of money on printing and you want to seriously change the impact your business' printing has on the environment, you need to make changes to your policies and make sure all staff are aware of them. Of course, there will always be times when it makes sense to print on the highest quality paper in full, glorious color (for instance if you are printing something to give to a prospective client at a sales pitch), so staff should be allowed to use their discretion, but good, clear printing policies that make sense to everybody can be set and distributed to encourage people within the business to change their default behaviors.

Policies to Consider

Here are some ideas for a cheaper, greener printing policy for your business:
·       Some fonts are designed to use far less ink than others. Consider using these as standard fonts for corporate documents, and include this within your company style guide.
·       Default settings for internal printouts (i.e. those not shown to clients) should be in grayscale, draft quality, with two pages per side of paper.
·       All printing (including higher quality prints for customers) should be double sided.
·       If MS Office is used, staff should be reminded of the 'Shrink To Fit' and 'Reduce by One Page' features for documents and spreadsheets.
·       Toner cartridges should be replaced when print quality starts to deteriorate, rather than when the printer warns that toner is low.
Implementing these policies should not be too difficult. You can distribute a memo by email, post the guidelines on the company intranet or other staff network, and include the printing policies with your other IT use policies in the induction materials you give to new people joining the company.

No comments:

Post a Comment