Top 5 tips for saving money and resources when printing
Our stats reveal that the average student print job uses between 2-3 sides of paper.
With some schools printing upwards of 100,000 pages per year. That’s a lot of trees and toner.
Administrators and educators can make small but significant changes to reduce the cost and environmental impact of printing in their organizations.
As a specialist in Chromebook printing with a large number of education sector customers, we’ve shared our top #5 money and resource saving tips:
For example: Do your 1st and 2nd grades need to print?
Could you give print rights only to the teachers for elementary classes?
Younger students, (while full of good intentions to show teacher their excellent work) love to see things pop out of the printer, curb their enthusiasm by emphasising the environmental impact of printing and ask them to respect it as a precious resource.
Safer still, if they have a Chromebook in front of them, disable printing.
Action: Define and implement a print policy for your school – decide which grades should have print access. Use your print management platform to implement class/age-specific print policies. Talk to your younger students about paper and trees, ink cartridges, waste and responsibility – they will respond positively.
Ask yourself: Does everyone need to print in best quality all the time?
You can save huge on toner costs by defaulting to draft mode.
Your print management system should allow you to set default draft mode for users or groups printing. Remember draft mode doesn’t mean just black-and-white printing. Smart printing solutions will include color reduction modes, use them – the difference in output quality can be difficult to spot but the toner saving adds up.
Action: Enable draft mode default and educate users.
Kinda obvious – instantly halves your paper consumption.
Either mandate, or set as the default option either on the printer itself or via your print management solution.
Action: Decide whether duplex works for your organization and check that box.
Little Johnny prints Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, all 366 pages of it.
Your paper tray and toner is now empty.
Your print system should allow you to specify a maximum page count per user per day, set a maximum limit to prevent abuse or costly print mistakes.
Get a regular breakdown of who’s printing what.Use the report to gently persuade heavy printing departments or individuals to print smarter.Be agile with your print policies, adjust them over time to reduce your overall print costs according to observed behavior.
Action: Decide what number a reasonable daily page count is for your organization.
How do you know how much you can save if you don’t know how much you’re spending?
Remember your ultimate goal is to be entirely paperless, take a stepwise approach…
Cost-per-side / per-page data for your printers is available on the web or specified in your Managed Print Service contract.
Action: Use your printers or print management solution to produce reports of who, what, how much printing is going on in your organization. It will reveal areas in which you can save.
If your print solution supports reprint detection, turn it on.
Reprint detection can encourage users to think about how many times they are printing a document and some solutions will offer to reprint only changed pages rather than the full document.
This can yield huge savings, especially when it comes to lengthy assignments by older students.
Wishing you happy, hassle-free printing.
