Green IT in Practice: How one company is approaching the greening of its IT

Chapter 8. Green Printing

Paper is far more expensive than the printing process, consuming 10 times the energy, according to Gartner.^[11] The issue for most companies, therefore, is the volume of printing (Gartner also reckon that a typical office worker prints 1,000 pages a month). The ‘paperless office’ never really happened, and it seems that all we really managed instead is ‘transient paper’, where we still all print a lot but just don’t keep the evidence. There is also the issue of the sheer number of printing devices a company has – usually significantly more than it needs.

Moving to a managed print service

In 2007, we embarked on a review which ultimately recommended the introduction of a managed print service to replace the existing approach ...