Implement good printing practices is possible !

Here are some easy quick-wins to curb your resources consumption during printing:

- Reduce Paper usage by:

• printing front & back / on 2 sides
• printing several pages on one sheet
• re-using paper

- Reduce Ink usage by:

• reducing the font size
• using grayscale colour in place of black (much lighter)
• changing regular fonts (like Arial, Comic Sans) for frugal fonts before printing (such as Times New Roman, Cambria, Century Gothic [in size 10], Garamond, Ryman Eco...). The university of Winsconsin-Green Bay led a study to reckon the impact of fonts in printing costs. They saved thousands of dollars by changing their font, as easy as it gets. More details here. Some fonts are quite sober: Garamond (24% less ink needed than Times New Roman/Comic Sans/Cambria) and Ryman Eco (33% less ink needed than Garamond!) are good choices.

- IT teams can deploy/update relevant laptops masters. By enforcing such masters, employees cannot change some printing settings. This practice can save a lot of resources in the end because it "automatically" enforces a sober mode for printing: two-side mode, Black & White mode, blank pages feature removed ...

- Deploy sign up/check-in processes to prevent people from printing at anytime for anything. If we have to walk to the printer to start the printing job, if we have a quota on printing jobs... we will think twice before printing it!

- Display visible, permanent guidelines nearby printers & Train your staff.

- Deploy specific printing softwares to monitor printing consumption. We recommend this one from Paper Cut.

As this section focuses on IT practices, please refer to this other section for paper & printing general solutions.