It’s fair to say we have reached a global consensus around the threat that climate change poses to humanity.
But while a majority of people in every country in the world think that human actions contribute to the climate emergency, this belief doesn’t always stack up against the way we behave in our everyday lives.
The number one reason is cost: although we are increasingly focused on sustainability, we are also feeling the weight of cost-of-living pressures which impact greatly on their purchasing decisions. Businesses, too, are recognising their responsibility to actively improve sustainability, but still need to ensure the ongoing financial viability of their company.
However, unlike other environmental initiatives, reducing print has at its core a secret benefit: it is where cost-savings and sustainability collide. So, for organisations looking to tick the sustainability box, print is one area that is worth the investment.
The barriers to going green
With rising inflation and costs, consumers and businesses can face tough decisions around balancing sustainability with their own budgets. The result is often a trade-off between choosing lower-priced products and services and those with less environmental impact.
Over one-third of consumers cite costs as their main obstacle to buying green. The recent downturn in sustainable shopping demonstrates that these cost barriers are making sustainable choices only accessible to higher income earners. But there are additional considerations: for many activities, such as recycling and limiting water use, convenience is a much bigger factor when it comes to reducing consumption. And in certain areas such as eating less meat, consumers are held back by a belief that their actions won’t have any significant impact.
This consumer price barrier poses a dilemma for businesses, as sustainable practices typically lead to higher costs which either need to be absorbed or passed on to consumers as a “green premium.” However, absorbing these costs can have a significant impact on the company’s profit margins in what is already a challenging operating environment.
The undertaking for businesses in reducing their environmental impact can often be significant not only in terms of upfront financial investment but also time and effort involved—such as renovating a building or fitting energy-efficient equipment to reduce power consumption, or reengineering processes to minimise waste. It may mean investigating your entire supply chain and switching to green suppliers, or implementing an extensive recycling program across the organisation.
At the very least, businesses will need to fund and organise an environmental impact audit to assess the extent of their resource and energy consumption and the amount of waste they produce, in order to set future sustainability goals. This in itself can be expensive and time-consuming—and that’s before the real work has even begun.
Cost savings, convenience, and impact: the business case for sustainable printing
As a sustainable solution, there is little obvious downside to reducing printing—on the contrary, it offers significant cost and convenience benefits to consumers and businesses. Implementing print quotas in schools and offices is an effective way to reduce waste associated with printing, which encompasses not only paper, but ink, toner, power, and even the number of printing devices.
Another opportunity for cost-savings is in account allocation, by implementing assigned ‘accounts’ based on different projects or departments. This can enable organisations to manage costs more effectively, redirecting savings to other important areas of the business.
But print reduction is also about saving time, which translates to greater convenience at both an individual and organisational level. Simply put, when people are printing less, they’re spending less time and effort at the printer trying to find their print job. Purpose-built features like Find-Me printing deliver both convenience and time-savings: it provides users with the ability to send their print jobs to a single print queue, then walk up to whatever printer is closest and release the job at any time.
In addition to cost-savings and convenience, one of the major advantages of sustainable printing is its clear value. It’s hard to argue with the environmental impact of reducing paper waste—and even harder with tools like environmental dashboards which shows at a glance how many trees your printing has consumed. Giving organisations and individuals access to printing reports and tracking empowers users to recognise the value of making small changes to their printing behaviour. Even simple printing policies, such as using double-sided printing as a default setting, can instantly reduce paper wastage and costs, with almost no user impact.
A direct – and rapid – return on investment
As printing consumes paper, toner chemicals, and power, there is a direct correlation between the amount of printing and the size of your environmental footprint. The greatest return on your investment is in printing less, which can be measured in lower costs on paper and ink, the number of printers required, time savings and, most importantly, fewer trees being cut down.
To illustrate this, let’s take a business with 50 employees who print the US average of 31 pages per day at a cost of 5 cents for black and white pages and 15 cents for colour. An estimated 20% reduction in printing would add up to cost savings of $10,500 in the first year, as well as saving 1.3 trees, 903 kg of carbon dioxide, and the energy equivalent of running a 60W light for 3.4 years.
While these savings are implementation dependent, our experience shows that monitoring printing has a direct impact on user behaviour, normally yielding a 10% to 20% reduction over an unmanaged print environment. I have seen this time and again in the organisations we’ve worked with—whether small businesses, large corporations, government bodies, or schools.
For example, KLM UK Engineering, which provides maintenance for a range of aircraft, was generating between 5,000 and 20,000 sheets of paper for each aircraft check. In a few months, its print reduction efforts have led to around £4,000 worth of cost-savings. Another major Australian food and liquor retailer was grappling with a huge wastage problem, with 4,000 staff continually duplicating their print jobs. The implementation of Find-Me printing enabled employees to print and release in any building and at any printing—resulting in an immediate 25% reduction in printouts.
These real-world examples demonstrate that print reduction is a powerful strategy for combining cost-saving with positive environmental impact. As organisations seek ways to minimise waste and maximise efficiencies, reducing print volumes offers tangible benefits in aligning operational goals with sustainability commitments—creating lasting value for both the business and the planet.
About the Author
Stu Brookes is EMEA Head of Sales & Channel at PaperCut. PaperCut was founded on a single question: How can we put an end to piles of wasted paper sitting in printer trays? Now, we’re joined by more than 125 million users – across all 195 countries and 85,000+ organizations – all crafting better environments one print job at a time. In a nutshell, our print management software inspires earth- and dollar-saving behavior by giving you powerful visibility and control over who prints what (and how much). It’s led to the wider PaperCut team saving over 750 million sheets of paper to date – that’s like 80,000 trees! It also makes your day-to-day a lot easier. After all, what really sets our solutions apart is how simple they are to install and use – no matter your size, your printers, or the devices and operating systems your users bring to the table. Everything just works.
