This is invitation central

Reduce Energy and Waste in Office Printing With These Five Tips and Ideas

If you are trying to make your office more green, you'll need to consider all of your business processes, including your printing. Wondering how to embrace energy efficient or green practices in your printing? In addition to trying to reduce how much your office prints, there are many other things you can do as well. Take a look at these ideas:

1. Change your default settings.

Talk with the head of your IT department about changing the default print settings on all of the computers in your office. To save ink, set all defaults to black and white, and select draft quality which uses less ink. Save professional quality and colour for special memos or marketing materials, rather than for everyday use.

2. Unplug printers that are not used as often.

If you have printers that you don't use very often, unplug them. That saves power, and when you need to use these printers on occasion, just plug them back in. Also, consider connecting all of your printers to a power strip so that you can turn off the power at the end of every workday.

3. Invest in multifunction printers.

In addition to strategically turning machines on and off, consider combining the roles of multiple machines into a single machine. In particular, invest in a multifunction printer that can handle your office's needs for scanning and faxing as well as printing. However, on the other hand, if you don't do any scanning or faxing, you may want to save energy by getting a simple printer designed just for printing.

4. Choose energy efficiency whilst shopping.

A combo of features isn't the only thing to consider. Also look at the energy efficiency of various printers. You can use a power usage meter to test how much power your existing printers are using, and then you can compare this to more efficient alternatives on the market. Then, crunch the numbers to see if you can save energy as well as a bit of cash on your electricity bills.

5. Use recycled printer cartridges.

When it's time to replace the ink cartridges or toners on your printer, don't just throw your old cartridges away. Instead, send them to a company that recycles old cartridges, and buy ink or toner that is encased in a remanufactured cartridge. That simply means that it is enclosed in an old cartridge that has been repaired and refilled, and in many cases, these cartridges boast the same level of quality as name brand cartridges.

 


Share