What costs more? A bottle of printer ink or Cristal Champagne?
According to a blog post on the Department of the Navy Office of the Chief Information Officer’s blog, a 750 ml bottle of Cristal costs about $350. If you filled that same bottle with black printer ink, it would cost $1,350. No wonder cutting printing costs is one of the Navy CIO’s top resolutions for 2012, Booz Allen Hamilton Associate Alison Dickson-Kozloski wrote.
Dickson-Kozloski said the average department employee uses approximately 10,000 sheets of paper per year that, according to a Citigroup-Environmental Defense study, can cost between six and 13 cents per page – a total of $600 to $1,300 per employee.
“A study conducted by Lexmark, a provider of printing and imaging products, found that 17 percent of pages printed were wasted pages, such as the page at the end of a web printout with just a URL or banner ad at the top, and multiple pages of legalese at the end of a document,” Dickson-Kozloski said.
Some additional reasons to minimize paper use from Dickson-Kozloski:
- Paper is expensive and represents a significant cost for office printing;
- Paper is an information management nightmare as it is extremely difficult to store, manage and share;
- Paper represents security risk as information can be easily misplaced, or simply left lying around where people, who should not have access to it, do; and
- Paper is a finite resource.
Also, here are some easy ways to save on printing costs, she wrote:
- Duplexing: Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company, found that organizations can potentially reduce annual paper costs by 30 percent by selecting duplex or double-sided printing as the default option.
- N-Up printing: Selecting the “n-up” or “multiple pages per sheet” option within Printing Preferences can be an effective way of including two or more pages on one sheet of paper (this works well for presentations). However, readability and formality often eliminate N-Up as an option for corporate use.
- Print preview: Using the print preview or print layout functions within most applications gives the user the opportunity to see an approximation of what they are about to print to ensure only the desired pages and content are printed.
(Thumbnail photo: Wikipedia)
