3 Easy Actions Your Business Can Take to Go Green!

With more businesses becoming aware of the environmental impact of their day-to-day operations, one would assume that a practice like printing would be on the decline due to how wasteful it is. Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Despite advances in digital communication, paper consumption continues to increase by 20 percent each year in modern offices.

Technology and innovation are on the front lines of reducing paper consumption. In fact, the latest printers are designed with new paper-saving features, which seems counterintuitive because one would think that a printer company would want to get their clients to print more so they can sell more. But in today's economy, green technology is a hot commodity.

Use Smart Printers with Print Release
One such printing feature is Print Release. This feature was implemented after research from Lexmark about paper consumption showed that one-in-six printed pages is never picked up. It's easy for a worker to accidentally print something from their desk and not bother checking to see if it printed or not, and we've all printed something with the intention of picking it up, only to get distracted by a different task.

With a smart printer feature like Print Release, the document to be printed is stored in the printer's queue. When the employee arrives at the printer, they will then scan their badge and select from the queue which document they want printed. If a document sits in the queue for a predetermined period time without being printed, it gets deleted. Lexmark claims that companies using the Print Release feature have seen paper savings average 30 percent, with many companies reporting savings as high as 50 percent.

Recycle Old Technology
Another way that you can help minimize the environmental impact of printing is to recycle your old equipment. Today, many technology vendors accept old equipment for recycling. They will break the old hardware down and reuse the raw materials to make new products. Products like paper, ink, and the material supplies used to make the hardware for printers, can all be reused to make new products out of less raw materials. Before you toss your old computer hardware into the garbage, give Macro Systems a call at (703) 359-9211 to learn about electronics recycling programs in your area.

Planting Trees
Lastly, it's not that paper consumption is akin to destroying the rainforest and polluting the planet. In fact, paper is one of the Earth's best sustainable resources. Recycling paper and planting trees are great ways to offset the amount of paper consumed by your office. You can look into the environmental standings of a technology vendor before buying products from them, and you can even pick up a shovel and have a company-wide tree planting day. As you consider how many trees your company needs to plant in order to make up for its paper usage, consider that the average tree harvested for paper makes 16.6 reams of paper.

We hope that your organization will feel inspired to go green with these three environmentally-friendly ideas. If you do any of these actions, be sure to mention it in your company newsletter and social media; going green makes for great PR!

Macro Systems can help you go green by equipping your organization with technology that will be easy on the environment and easy on your budget like a smart printer. One green solution that goes great with a smart printer is a print server, which can streamline your entire printing process and help you consume less paper, ink, and electricity.

For help going green, give us a call at (703) 359-9211, and remember, it's like Lexmark CEO Paul Rooke says, "The cheapest page is the one you never print."