Earth Day 2012: Commerce Saves Trees—and Money—by Cutting Down on Printing
Guest blog post by Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Rebecca Blank
Earth Day is here, and Commerce is seeing the positive results of its year-long campaign to “go green” and drive down costs in print. Just this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Commerce’s largest bureau, announced it has removed over one-third of its desktop printers, bringing total savings from the Commerce print project to $4.7 million per year.
Commerce spends $25 million annually on print–which includes equipment, paper, toner, energy and services. Last year we took a look at where that money was going and found that:
- Commerce printed 250 million pages on its networked printers.
- Nearly all of those pages were printed single-sided, and a quarter were printed in color.
- We also had a high ratio of employees-to-desktop printers, which use more toner and are more expensive than shared printers.
- And we realized we had 350 contracts and 400 vendors, with very little centralized ordering.