Greening the print environment is relatively simple and offers significant cost benefits, says printing and IT solutions specialist and HP preferred partner Introstat.
South African large enterprises and a growing number of small and mid-size enterprises are going greener - partly due to environmental concerns, but also due to the potential cost savings, says William du Preez, Services and Solutions divisional manager at Introstat.
Greening the print environment entails a great deal more than responsible cartridge and e-waste disposal, explains Du Preez. "For responsible e-waste disposal, programmes such as HP's suppliers return and recycling programme offer a simple way to dispose of print cartridges for free. Partners like Introstat simply place the HP box at the client's offices and ensure they are disposed of in the right manner."
However, e-waste disposal is just one component of greener printing. In the green discussion, large enterprises focus primarily on recycling and energy efficiency, Du Preez says. "In an environment with thousands of printers, the benefits of using more energy efficient devices are measurable." He notes that HP's new laser printers, with a 40% smaller footprint and greater energy efficiency, not only reduce energy consumption, but also deliver prints faster.
In addition to opting for more energy efficient devices, companies can also reduce power consumption in the printer environment by reducing the number of devices in their fleet. "HP's balanced deployment model calls for some consolidation, with redundancy," says Du Preez. He explains that instead of consolidating all smaller printers into a single large MFP, the balanced deployment model reduces the large fleet to two or three devices that share large print loads intelligently and offer redundancy should one device break down.
Reducing unnecessary paper usage reduces a company's carbon footprint and significantly cuts costs, says Du Preez. In an optimally managed print environment, paper waste can be reduced through measures such as access management and associated print quota controls, or through duplex printing to deliver double-sided prints.
"Many companies still lean towards printing single-sided sheets because, in the past, making duplex prints slowed devices down. However, HP's new devices print both sides at the same pace, saving time and paper," says Du Preez. He notes that HP double-headed scanners also scan both sides of a document in a single pass, allowing for paper and cost savings on scans too. HP estimates that paper savings on double-sided prints alone could amount to around 50%, depending on the documents printed.
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