Tough facts on hard copy

The long held dream of the paperless office remains as elusive as ever. But not only that; millions of pounds are wasted by UK businesses on hard copies that are never used or are immediately binned.

On average, one out of every five pages is printed needlessly, says printer and printing supplies company, Lexmark UK. Research the company conducted in 2004 has shown that 110 billion pages are printed annually and that gash pages cost British business at least £231 million per annum, working on the conservative estimate of a penny per page.

Lexmark estimate that hard copy document production amounts to between one and three per cent of a company’s annual revenue, a not insignificant amount for most businesses. Despite the financial costs of printer hardware, toner, paper and electricity to run them, few businesses are fully aware of what their organisation spends on document production, never mind what is spent unnecessarily.

It is clear that old habits die hard. Dead tree documents stubbornly remain. However, if more attention is focussed on the subject it should become plain to most that paper copies cost far more than soft copy digital versions that are properly managed and archived. Paper, as a sage once said, does not grow on trees.

But how can the small to micro-sized business with a small IT budget save on its hard copy printing costs?

A number of simple steps can be taken:

1) Measure what is currently spent on paper and toner
2) Encourage staff to think about what and why they are printing
3) Make it easy for staff to save documents digitally
4) Examine current printing output and weed out waste
5) Cut out multi-handling of documents and unnecessary processes
6) Set the default printer settings to draft quality
7) Restrict who has access to a shared network printer
8) Consider using a black and white printer instead of colour unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise
9) Limit access to printer paper and toner cartridges. Use a lighter weight of paper for draft documents and for proofreading
10) Make sure you are getting the best possible deal on toner and paper. Toner is the most expensive element, so consider a generic brand of toner cartridge rather than a manufacturer’s branded product which can often cost more than double.

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