Printing/Conserving Toner

Did you know it only takes a few easy step to save toner resources?

Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Banner Pages
If you reduced the practice of printing banner pages you could potentially reduce company consumable cost by 20%. I found and interesting statistic from Gartner research that says A 1,000-person organization could cut up to 1.6 million pages and save $33,500 per year by eliminating banner page printing. (McNee p.1) To make up for the short fall of not having banner pages, I would recommend implementing user authentication at all devices. This user authentication could be biometric based. This practice will also conserve resources by helping eliminate printed job not being picked up.

Color Printing
Color printing costs are 4 times as high as a standard black and white printing. The reason is that the color printer is more costly is that the printer uses four cartridges to make a document. Color impressions can run as high as $.25 per page for some jobs. (Weilerstein pg.2) A full color 10-page document can cost as much as $2.50. Most office staff may not have a legitimate need for color printing. This is not to say that no department needs to print in color. Certain documents like graphs and diagrams need color to differentiate between numbers and columns. Color printers are a necessarily evil at most organizations, however we could drastically reduce cost if we evaluate where these printers are placed. For instance the advertising department probably needs full color, but the accounting department may not. We should also create a document and send it by e-mail organization wide and suggest alternatives for color printing. A few examples might be power point presentation really don’t need to be printed, they are easily viewed on the screen.

Toner Density
Toner density is the amount of toner applied to each page. If organization reduduced toner density they could realize savings of 5% to 10% reduction in toner consumption. (McNee p.3)