Introduction
How often have you turned up to a meeting to find multiple copies of the agenda and meeting notes (often in colour) printed out when you’ve brought your own or have them stored on a portable device? Have you often wondered how you could change your working practices to reduce your reliance on paper? Would you like to know more about the online tools available to you and your team to work collaboratively? If so, we can help!
Operation Paper cut is a University wide project initiated by colleagues in Learning & Information Services, working in partnership with the Environmental & Sustainability Team, to address ways to reduce print usage among Academic and Proffessional Services Staff in the day to day running of the university.
The Challenge
As a staff community we would like to set ourselves the target of reducing our print usage by 20%. Last financial year, excluding services provided by the Print Shop, we printed 3,346,734 sides of paper with 15% being in colour. To reach our 20% reduction target we need to print 669,347 less sides of paper. Together we can do this!
Not only will this reduce waste and carbon emissions, this will also save us money. For example, last year we printed 436,043 colour sides of paper. If we didn’t print these pages we would have saved over £14k, without even including paper costs! Printing in colour is 10 times more expensive than black and white. If, for example, the 436,043 colour pages printed were in black and white we would have still saved £12.7k. This money could definitely be used in better ways.
Look out for our monthly newsletters detailing current state of the challenge, tips for saving on printing and news on how colleagues are meeting the challenge.
How we can help
We know it can be hard to reduce printing, especially when it’s such a key aspect of business life. To help, the Operation Paper Cut team, led by the IT Skills team, are available to work with individuals and teams to help achieve our aim.
Specifically, we can help to:
• Analyse current business processes to identify areas for simplification and improved efficiencies
• Help individuals and teams experiment with the latest tools for collaborative working
• Explore ways to reduce printing costs and save you time
• Improve the accessibility of resources
• Promote a greener workplace
How can you get involved?
If you would like advice, training or support on how to improve your department printing activities contact the Skills Team at skills@chi.ac.uk or on 01243 793535.
Your efforts won’t go unnoticed as 5000 JUMP scheme points will be awarded to your team for just booking a session.
Furthermore, once your team starts reducing printing you’ll be awarded 0.25 points for every black and white page saved and a whopping 0.5 points for every colour page saved
What you can do today!
Before You Print
- Do you need to print that document?
- Use Office 365 to share and edit your work with colleagues (One Note, Excel online, Word online, One Drive, Sharepoint)
- Would it be better to upload the resources to Moodle, rather than print?
- In meetings, display agendas, minutes and other documents on a screen using AV equipment, or email to participants beforehand
- Use a laptop, tablet, or your phone in meetings instead of printed sheets
- Scan to e-mail instead of photocopying
- Email documents or links to yourself
- Read and edit all documents on screen
- Cut and paste only the information you need into Word or a .txt file
- Use bookmarks (favourites) to keep track of web information you wish to retain rather than printing
- Print to PDF and share documents electronically
To make the most of your day to day printing, and the occasional special project, please consider the information below after the decision has been made that a hard copy is necessary
- Are you using the right printer? If you know you will need to print multiple copies to supply as resources to students or colleagues, it will be far cheaper, and easier on you to send it to the print shop.
With a little bit of planning this could be done at the start of term, which in turn will make your pre teaching routine somewhat less stressful, and the printed copies will look more professional - Black & White vs. Color – Colour costs 10 x more to print than Black & White!
- Single sided vs. duplex – Always print on both sides
- Use narrow margins to get more content on each page
- Use a smaller font to get more content on each page
- Print only the pages you need
- Use Print Preview to ensure that your document will print as expected rather than produce multiple “test” copies