Printers become power savers

During these difficult times when companies are trying to bring down their spending, every little effort counts. However, a lot of companies don't realise that going green can also help bring the bills down if the right practices and technologies are used.

Dan Smith, General Manager, Integrated Marketing, MEA, Xerox, told Emirates Business: "Being environmentally friendly makes good business sense as not only will the consumers love you for it, it also helps cut expenses as green practices have a direct impact on a businesses' bottomline. How? Through waste reduction as well as reduced power consumption as starting points.

"Take paper for instance. It takes ten times the amount of energy to produce a single sheet of paper than to print on it. Hence, saving paper must be considered in any environmental offering. But, when you print on double sided paper, you also save money by cutting down on paper consumption.

"Also when businesses use technologies that are energy efficient, users are effectively reducing their carbon footprint by cutting energy use in their operations. Many companies including Xerox provide customers with document systems that are 30 per cent more energy efficient than previous models.

"By using such solutions, customers will experience reduction in energy use and waste. Also, by replacing single-function devices like printers and copiers with multifunction systems users can reduce energy use from their document technology by up to 50 per cent. Power-down and sleep-mode features are standard in document systems and help cut energy bills." On average Xerox said an organisation spends between 3 to 5 per cent of revenues on producing documents. State-of-the-art office document assessments can help save customers 20 to 30 per cent of these document-related costs.

"For instance Dow Chemical saved more than $4.6 million (Dh16.8m) annually, after replacing 16,000 printers with 6,000 of our MFPs," said Smith.

Tips To Cut Down Spending

Xerox gave some tips on how businesses can save a significant amount of money by being green and making small changes around their offices.

Replace stand-alone devices with MFPs: Instead of buying several individual fax machines or printers, buy one product that can print, copy, scan and fax. You will save money by purchasing supplies for only one device and using less amount of electricity.

Choose energy-saving products: Save money on energy bills by choosing Energy Star compliant printers and multifunction printers. Make sure Energy Star is enabled before you start using the equipment.

Look for environmentally responsible print technologies: Scientific breakthroughs like Emulsion Aggregate Toner and Solid Ink allow you to print more while creating less waste. While the Emulsion Aggregate delivers sharper, more uniform image quality, longer fuser life, better reliability and lower total cost of ownership over the life of a machine, Solid Ink products use cartridge-free blocks of ink instead of toner. Solid Ink is easy to use and produces up to 90 per cent less waste than comparable colour laser printers.

Think before you print: Use the print preview feature to avoid printing unwanted pages. Better yet, use Green Print software that automatically finds pages with typical waste characteristics, such as pages with just a URL, banner ad, logo or legal jargon, and asks if you want to print them. It also allows users to remove images from a page prior to printing resulting in a significant saving in ink or toner. The GreenPrint software saves an average user Dh330, along with 1,400 wasted pages per year.

Duplex print and copy: Using both sides of a page is the best way to reduce paper use.

Adjust print driver default settings: Customise your print drivers to become more eco-and budget-friendly. Choose duplex printing as your "default" mode and adjust settings for specific applications, such as always printing emails in black-and-white.

Use recycled paper and recycle used paper: The paper industry's goal is to reach 60 per cent paper recovery by 2012, according to the Paper Industry Association Council. Recycling paper fibre saves trees, energy, water and chemicals and of course your money. Keep a recycling box at each desk to make it easy to collect used paper. And choose environmentally preferable papers such as recycled content papers, papers certified to sustainable forest management standards (FSC or SFI) or innovative papers like High Yield Business Paper which is produced using half the number of trees as conventional paper.

Use scanning to enable digital workflows: Scanning documents makes them easy to archive, share, e-mail and retrieve. This saves time spent searching for information, and saves money by reducing paper document storage costs.

Soft copy: Distribute documents electronically rather than in hard copy.

Use old equipment: Look for pre-owned or refurbished equipment for your office which is manufactured to meet original factory specifications, tested and quality-checked by technicians, and comes with a warranty.

Install secure printing: Organisations can save a significant amount of money by controlling who is printing, and what is printed ie avoiding colour printing unless needed. Secure printing allows users to hold jobs at the device until a user enters a PIN number to claim them. This also insures security for sensitive documents, which is a necessity and could cost a lot of money for legal, health care and financial organisations. The exact costs are unidentifiable, but the costs arise when non-compliance comes to the fore.

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