Tips for greener printing
reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center
HP wants to make maintaining an environmentally conscious workplace a reality for businesses everywhere. Adopting a more environmentally responsible workplace doesn’t mean your company has to undergo a major reorganization of its daily operations. In fact, HP has a few tips that can lessen the waste your company produces and improve energy efficiency, all the while potentially reducing your overhead costs.
Increase your printing efficiency
There are techniques that your business can employ that increase the efficiency of paper, ink and toner usage. Merely ask yourself the following before printing a document:
- Is this document laid out efficiently? Formatting your documents resourcefully is a painless way to save paper when printing documents. Reducing font size a couple of points and reducing margin settings can trim a document’s size without taking away from the quality of the document. It is also very efficient to print on both sides of the paper. You get the entire document while using half the amount of paper!
- Is this material recycled? Generally speaking, using recycled materials helps save resources and minimizes waste. Recycled materials can be used in the products themselves or in the packaging. For example, HP incorporates recycled material into the packaging of both its printers and printer cartridges, as well as offers HP Office Recycled, a printing paper made up of 100% post consumer waste product. You can even recycle HP branded printer cartridges through the free HP Planet Partners program.
- Do I really need to print this? You may be used to printing out documents for review, but word processing programs and other software come with document-tracking capabilities that allow comments to be added electronically. Also, if you just want to check the formatting of a document, the print preview function in word processing software can give you a look at document while saving you paper and a trip to the printer. Finally, if you need to work collaboratively in Microsoft Excel, it’s easy to ‘share’ spreadsheets electronically so more than one person can work on the same document at the same time rather than print it out each time you wish to work on it as a group
Reducing your waste
Printing documents is a reality that businesses can’t simply give up. This is where adopting a recycling plan in your office can help your company achieve a greener printing environment.
- The most obvious step in creating a culture of recycling at your workplace is to collect all of your unwanted print-outs and other paper for recycling. Create recycling stations that are easily accessible to all employees and remind them how best to use these new recycling systems.
- Reusing unwanted single side prints for internal note taking or shredding unwanted documents and using them for packing material are two easy way to repurpose paper before sending them off for recycling.
Purchase products that utilize recyclable packaging. For example, HP packages their products in material that can be easily recycled alongside normal paper. - Use the free HP Planet Partners program to quickly and easily return your empty HP print cartridges for recycling. Check the print cartridge box for a postage-paid return envelope; or go to the product recycling page to order your free, postage-paid return envelopes.
Become more power efficient
All of your office equipment uses power when it is switched on or in stand-by mode. There are a few of things you can do to minimize power consumption. Consider the following and you could save both energy and company overhead costs:
- Encourage employees to completely turn off their desktop printers when they leave for the day. Also, make sure that equipment that is rarely used is left off rather than on stand-by mode.
- Choose products that are ENERGY STAR® qualified. HP offers 1,000 models of office products today that are ENERGY STAR qualified.
- Each employee doesn’t necessarily need their own printer in order to have a productive environment. Instead, HP recommends a balanced deployment of multifunction products (MFPs) and single-function devices as a better approach. This strategy can improve printing efficiency, cut costs and dramatically increase device utilization.