By Wendi Latko, Vice President, Global Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability
Now that we’re a few weeks into the new year, it’s a great time to take stock of your goals. Have you made the progress you’d hoped for by now?
Many organizations vow to go greener each year. Whether or not sustainability is on your list of resolutions, here are 10 simple things you can start doing now. Stick with them, and your office will be more environmentally responsible, productive and cost effective in the long run.
- Use default and optional settings to make it automatic. Adjust your print driver default settings to duplex, which automatically will print on both sides of the sheet. Deselect the cover sheet and you’ll avoid printing a sheet unnecessarily. If you want others to know it’s your print, select the watermark option and you can place your initials or some other identifier on the sheet in a conspicuous fashion. Set draft modes and toner-saving modes for prints that don’t require high-quality output.
- Select energy-efficient printers and multifunction printers that bear the EPA Energy Star and EPEAT labels. Like Energy Star, EPEAT signifies energy efficiency and fewer GHG emissions. EPEAT criteria goes beyond the energy used during normal operation and covers other environmental impacts that apply across the entire product lifecycle, from design and manufacture to end-of-life. These other environmental impacts would include solid waste, material use and water.
- Choose innovative printing technologies, such as Xerox-proprietary Emulsion Aggregation (EA) Toner. EA Toner offers sharp image quality, great reliability and low total cost of ownership because it reduces the amount of toner needed for printing a page and requires lower fuser temperature. That means electricity consumption will be reduced by up to 20% and CO2 emissions by up to 35%, compared to conventional toner.
- Recycle office paper, and print on recycled papers or FSC certified paper.
- Engage your employees in fun ways. Make it a competitive challenge. With the Xerox Print Awareness Tool, you can do just that. The tool raises employees’ awareness about the impacts of their printing decisions, and communicates office “news” using the customizable posting feature.
- Use scanning to enable digital workflows. By turning manual, paper-based processes into efficient, digital ones, you’ll save paper, time and money and reduce the number of errors.
- Send used toner cartridges back to Xerox through our Green World Alliance recycling program, which prevents millions of supply items from entering landfills each year. You can even consolidate returns of five to 30 used supply items in a single box and ship them to us.
- Implement secure printing to hold print jobs at the device until a user enters a PIN to claim them. A time-out feature deletes unclaimed jobs. This prevents forgotten prints from piling up at the device.
- Look for pre-owned or remanufactured equipment produced to meet original factory specifications. It’s tested and checked by Xerox technicians and comes with a warranty. Buying remanufactured saves you money, and saves millions of pounds of material from entering landfills.
- Trade in your old device for cash toward a new Xerox printer or multifunction printer. We can dispose of your old device properly, or remanufacture the parts to reduce waste.
I learned that Secure Print deletes unclaimed jobs – Good to know! Thanks!