February 28, 2025
Who doesn’t want their business to be more sustainable? It’s an admirable goal, but one that’s often associated with increased costs, more hassle — and let’s be honest — giving up things that make our lives easier.
But one of the easiest ways to make a big impact on your business’s sustainability doesn’t have to cost more, involve more hassle, or make your life any harder at work than it already is. If increasing sustainability is on your agenda for 2025 and beyond, your printers can be your worst enemies or your greatest allies.
Printing Habits That Cause Sustainability Issues in Business
Wasteful printing is expensive, but it’s also bad for the environment. Paper still represents around 26% of total waste in landfills.
Many organizations rely on printing for their critical workflows and will continue to for the foreseeable future. But even if that describes your organization, that doesn’t mean you can’t significantly increase sustainability.
Here are wasteful printing habits that are entirely unnecessary:
- Printing before proofreading
- Using full color when black and white will do
- Using ink-hogging fonts
- Reprinting documents you’ve already printed (and forgotten about)
- Printing on only one side of the paper for internal documents
- Printing things you don’t need hard copies of
Simple Business Sustainability Strategies
To be fair, some of those wasteful printing habits are hard to change organization-wide. And that’s not because people want to do harm but because most of these things are very easy to forget about. That sounds like bad news, but sometimes human nature can work in your favor.
1. Use Your Default Settings To Your Advantage
Most users don’t adjust their print settings between print jobs unless their document has a specific purpose. It just feels like extra work! So if you configure your printers’ default settings to your advantage, you can save quite a bit of money while helping the environment.
Whenever possible, update your printers’ default settings to:
- Printing in black and white
- Duplex or 2-sided printing
- Draft mode or economy printing
That might not sound that impactful, but even if the only change you make is switching to 2-sided printing, you will significantly reduce paper consumption throughout your organization!
2. Switch to an Ink-Saving Font
Want to reduce ink and toner consumption by a third? Just use a slimmer font. Century Gothic uses 30% less ink than Arial. Other sustainable fonts include:
- Times New Roman
- Courier
- Garamond
- Baskerville
- Ecofont
Haven’t heard of Ecofont? Well, you’re about to. Ecofont uses tiny holes in its design that are almost imperceptible to the naked eye, but depending on your current font, it can save you 20% on ink. The holes get more obvious when the font is blown up, but it’s a great choice for normal paragraph text.
3. Enable Secure Printing
Secure printing, which is also known as pull-printing or follow-me printing, is not only a great way to become more sustainable but it’s also a great way to improve workplace security.
Shared printers are great. In fact, the ideal printer-to-employee ratio is typically about 10:1. However, one bad part about having a shared printer is that it’s really easy to forget what you’ve printed and what you haven’t, and that means sensitive information could be left lying around.
It’s not just you — around 30% of print jobs are never picked up from the printer.
But once again, you can use human nature (and print management software) to your advantage.
With secure printing, a printer won’t release a print job until an authorized user either swipes a badge or enters a PIN. So just like that, you can solve the print-it-and-forget-it problem! You’ll also get a surprising amount of insight into who is printing what, which can be eye-opening. And can we just say this? Having to walk all the way to the printer to retrieve every job means more employees will reconsider whether printing is necessary in the first place.
Just to be clear, we’re not advocating that you should make life harder for departments with significant print needs. But we are saying that thoughtful printer placement can work to your advantage.
4. Get Rid of Most Personal Printers
Yes, we know. Harsh! But personal printers make it so much easier to maintain wasteful print habits. They also require additional electricity and take up unnecessary space.
In some rare circumstances, it makes sense to keep a personal printer. But we’re in favor of banning them if at all possible.
5. Consider Adding a Document Management System
With a document management system (DMS), your printer can also help you automate workflows, which means you can reduce your paper consumption while making your office more efficient — not less.
Here are just a few ways this powerful software can support a digital transformation:
- It can enable secure digital document workflows, like contract signing and new employee onboarding
- It can facilitate paperless processes
- Employees can scan documents to create digitized versions that are easily searchable
- It makes it easier to share documents electronically
- It’s easier to see who’s seen what
- It’s easier to repurpose work
There’s more, but we think you get the idea.
Expert Help With Print Sustainability and Business Process Automation
Every business has different printing needs and habits. So while we’re happy to provide general tips, if you’re hoping to increase sustainability while you increase efficiency, the solution that brings the most ROI for one type of organization might not for another.
For some organizations, working with a managed print services (MPS) provider to save on paper, ink, and electricity might have the most impact. For others, using their printers to automate more aspects of their business might be a better choice. We can help with either or both.
However, since managed print services are more widely understood, we’re attaching our newer guide to business process automation below. Click the link below to get more ideas of how it can reduce “busy work” and much more!
