Networked copiers / printers?
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My campus Print Services department is hoping to get the entire campus (public state school with approx. 15,000 students) to adopt a networked approach to printers/copiers. They would like to make sustainability a keystone of their approach. Has you campus done this or do you know of campuses who have? Do you know of any studies or even anecdotal evidence that this reduces paper consumption, saves energy, improves indoor air quality? Any information on the barriers to implementation (i.e. people don't want to give up their individual printers in their offices and walk 30 ft to the shared device, technology challenges, etc.)?Any ideas on where to look for such data?
Thanks,
Aurora Winslade, Sustainability Coordinator, Univ California Santa Cruz
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Hi Aurora,
I'm not sure I can provide a lot of hard data, but I did come across quite a fewinstitutions who do promote and use networked printers. I hope some of the information below is helpful.
Hewlett Packard put out a case study on work with UC Davis to save energy and paper use through a variety of approaches, one of which was shared, networked printing.
The University of Colorado at Boulder has a nice Green Computing Guide, however, it only briefly touches on the issue of networking printers.
Northwestern University on their energy efficient computing webpage, recommends purchasing networked printers whenever possible.
San Diego City College on their how to lower your impact on the campus website mentions the need to make sure folks actually pick up the documents they print out; and mentions that in some cases people send documents to networked printers and neglect to ever pick them up.
Williams College on their green computing page asks users to make sure when printing to a networked printer that they know which location it is printing to (for example, in a large library with mulitple printer stations you should know which one you are printing to). If you do not know where the documents are printing, you run the risk of reprinting the same information before figuring out what happened.