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Did you know that in the United States the typical office employee prints 31 pages per day and consumes about 10,000 sheets of printer/copier paper per year? The overall result is that around 750,000 copies are printed each minute and a total of 12.1 trillion sheets of paper are consumed by offices each year. On top of this, it is estimated that between 10 and 35% of printed paper is never picked up from the printer/copier and that about 45% of the printed paper is disposed of the same day (EnergyStar).
In order to put these facts into perspective in terms of the impact to our environment, it is helpful to look at how many trees are required to support such consumption. Every year American businesses use approximately 21 million tons of paper, which contributes significantly to the overall 85 million tons of paper waste that is produced. Noting that it takes on average 24 mature trees to produce one ton of paper, 504 million trees are consumed annually to support the paper needs of American businesses.
Not only does office paper use result in the consumption of a disturbingly large number of trees, it also leads to significant energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. This is the reason that it is not only important to first conserve paper but also to ensure that the equipment used to make prints and copies is energy efficient. One sure way of doing this is to purchase multi-function imaging equipment that is Energy Star certified. Such equipment are designed to use up to 35% less energy than their standard energy-use counterparts by including "Sleep" and other energy savings features. Including a "Sleep" feature on such equipment can be very effective in reducing energy use due to the fact that most multi-function imaging equipment in only in active use about 5% of the time. What's more is that purchasing equipment that has been remanufactured will eliminate the need to add the one-time emissions (~1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide - EcoLeaf) associated with the production of new imaging equipment.
Please see the following link for the sources associated with many of the statistics presented above.
Objective
Step 1 - Reduce paper waste.
Adjust your printer settings for double-sided printing as often as possible. (This will immediately reduce paper waste by one half.)
Instead of printing documents for scanning, save them as pdfs on your computer using the "Microsoft Print to PDF" option located within the "Printer" selection menu.
Step 2 - Purchase energy-efficient printer/copier equipment.
A complete list of Energy Star certified printing equipment can be found on the Energy Star website (including those that are remanufactured).
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