Questions as to how we can better protect our environment are more crucial and relevant than ever. Printing has also fallen into disrepute as a real environmental sin. But not necessarily rightly so. If you look at the CO2 emissions caused by printing when compared with electronic media, printing at about 5-6g CO2 per page is not always worse than using a smartphone, laptop or tablet.
However, there is still a lot that can be done in everyday office life to reduce the printing carbon footprint. In our whitepaper “A Paper-Free Future?” we go into this in further detail.
You can easily implement these 3 tips without any great effort:
1. Use Recycled Paper
Recycled paper has left its grey days behind. Fortunately, the differences between virgin fiber and recycled paper are no longer visible. On the other hand, in terms of CO2 emissions, it is noticeable. CO2 emissions of 1.2 kilograms are produced per kilogram of virgin fiber paper, compared with just 0.7 kilograms for recycled paper.
2. Print Duplex
Printing on both sides of the paper offers enormous CO2 savings potential. The calculation couldn’t be simpler – paper use is reduced by 50%. If only half a package of 500 sheets of paper is used, CO2 emissions of between 1 and 1.5 kilograms can be avoided. You can easily roll out sustainable printer options such as duplex or black-and-white printing as default settings to users or teams with ezeep Blue’s Printer Profiles feature.
3. Replace Laser Printers with Inkjets
This tip is especially useful for smaller print volumes. Inkjet printers with just 15 watts require up to 84% less power than inkjet printers with 1300 watts. The warmup phase is completely eliminated, and an inkjet printer doesn’t emit any particulates.
If you implement these 3 tips in your day-to-day printing routines, you’ll already be going a long way to lowering your carbon footprint when printing. At ezeep, we go one step further and make sure our solution doesn’t even increase CO2 emissions.
ezeep Ensures Printing is Carbon Neutral
Through a number of measures, we make sure that our customers print climate neutrally with ezeep. For example, we only make our printing service available via hosting providers that also work climate neutrally.
In addition, we support the justdiggit.org initiative. Their motto is digging, greening & cooling and the project has dedicated itself to replanting areas suffering from drought in order to have a positive impact on climate change. This helps to reduce temperatures in the long term. Aside from reducing CO2 output, it is in our eyes one of the most efficient measures combating climatic change.
You can find more information at ezeep.com/co2-neutral-printing