When I first started my job at my current employer, one of the first things I noticed was the huge amounts of paper that were wasted on a daily basis, due to our company's undying love of printing documents. Not only do we love to print, but we print copious amounts of one sided copies... in color. (shudder, shudder)
Well, now we're jumping on the green bandwagon (it's about time) and are currently piloting a "printer test program," for lack of a better phrase. This pilot is being tested in only one building for now... but based on the success so far, it's likely this will be rolled out more broadly.
Here's what we did: we reduced the number of printers in one of our buildings from 40+ local, network printers to only three multi-functional devices (one of those gigantic machines that prints, scans & faxes). If you dare to print, your copies are automatically defaulted to black & white, and... prints double-sided copies!
As a result, we have saved an average of 738 sheets of paper per day. If you extrapolate to one year at this rate, we'll save over 180,000 sheets or 37 cases of paper this year.
If we roll this pilot out to all of our buildings, we will save 1.6M sheets or 320 cases of paper annually.
Not bad!
Great idea! I’m the Facility Manager for my company Noetix Corporation (www.noetix.com). I’m in the process of implementing a project called ‘Noetix Green’. I will be forming a Green Committee that will meet monthly to come up with ideas to implement at work to reduce the amount of resources we use and to encourage recycling at work and at home.
We too have limited the number of printers at our company and I encourage everyone to print double-sided prints. One of the many ideas for our Green committee is to start our own company ‘Green Blog’ to give our employees recycling tips and ideas.
My main goal of this committee is to make our company as green as possible and to hopefully encourage employees to reduce, conserve and recycle at home too.
Mark
Hi Mark! That’s great to hear your facilitating your company’s efforts to “go green.” Yay! Good luck to you – keep us posted on your progress!