Paper-and-planet-saving-printing made easy

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 12 December 2007 14:08

Science - Energy

How often do you print out draft documents at high quality, wasting toner, or one-up instead of two-up, wasting paper, because you forget, could not be bothered or didn't know how to set up the printer? Well, now there's an easy way to do all these things. It's called Intelligent Print Control (IPC) and it's brought to you by IBM and Ricoh's InfoPrint Solutions venture. It claims to cut paper (and toner) use by automatically choosing the most appropriate printer setting for each document. (InfoPrint Solutions, formerly IBM's Printing Systems Division, was formed in June 2007 as a joint venture company with Ricoh owning 51 percent and set to progressively acquire the remaining 49 percent over the next three years.)
 
According to Bruce McLennan, director of IPC distributor, Print Associates, "almost all office printers today are capable of printing double-sided or two-up (two pages on each side of the paper). And most all printers have the ability to use less of the expensive toner that produces the image...[but] people have to go into a lot of screens looking for these settings – and each printer is slightly different."

He claims that, with Intelligent Print Control, the user just has to click the print icon and the print jobs will come out automatically in the appropriate format. The program is claimed to work with any model of printer. Each user of an office printer can have his or her own printing profile. The user selects their printing preferences once – rather than every time they use the printer. Text recognition algorithms can be set to detect words such as 'draft' or 'final' in documents and change printer settings to match.

Even a modest reduction in paper consumption could have substantial benefits. According to Print Associates, a single office worker can print out up to 15,000 A4 sheets of paper a year (that's 60 per day, which seems a tad excessive). On this basis it claims that a business of 5,000 people would produce 65 tonnes of CO2 each year through the paper they use.

Print Associates does not explain what aspects of paper usage and consumption are factored into this figure but does note, quite rightly, that "as well as trees, there is a significant quantity of water used to produce, first, the pulp and, later, the paper itself...The CO2 impact of tree removal, energy used in felling operations, transport to paper mills, the energy for the mills themselves and then transport to the offices where the paper is used creates a heavy burden on the planet from use of paper." So IPC seems like a pretty good idea - so long as people use it properly.