Printing COSTS!

Issue 44, Fall 2009

by Rob Galbraith, Connor Harron & Marie Raney

A casual observer might conclude that Western runs on paper. We assign papers, we present papers, we need to see the paperwork, we even give our students a very special piece of paper when they graduate. We produce rough drafts, revised drafts and final drafts. We print, copy, collate, staple, bind, archive and ultimately shred our papers, but we rarely stop to think about the true costs of these actions.

Student Printing

Students printed 1,649,628 sheets of paper during fall quarter 2008 The 12,564 individual students who accomplished this printed an average of 131 sheets each. The print total above multiples to over 5,000,000 sheets in the course of one year. Even taking advantage of the best prices and bulk purchases, the University spent more than $100,000 on paper and toner for this portion of printing alone. Other costs include maintenance on the printers and the cost of power.

Environmental Costs

The environmental costs of producing these 5,000,000 sheets are also quite staggering. It will take more than 500 trees to provide the fiber. More than 150,000 gallons of water will be needed to process the fiber into sheets. The process will require energy equivalent to 1,500 gallons of oil and it will produce 157 tons of CO2. We estimate that the University as a whole prints and copies as many as 20,000,000 sheets per year which would increase all of the above costs by a factor of four.

What Can You Do?

Individuals and departments can use the following techniques to save paper resources:

• Purchase paper containing 40% (or higher) post-consumer (recycled) fibers;
• Make the default (or set individual documents) to print two-sided (duplex) to save paper. Purchase printers that have this capability;
• Reduce printing margins from an expansive 1.25" to a trimmer .75" saving an estimated 5% of total sheets.

Perhaps the most sustainable technique in this electronic age is to find alternatives to pushing the “print” command at all. Instead,

• read from the screen rather than the printed page,
• bookmark sites for future reference rather than printing pages
• change your expectations about what you can receive and store electronically rather than on paper.

To make the most of university resources, we recommend that instructors first give students the choice of whether to use printed material or to read online. Online reading offers the possibility of electronically searching for a phrase or word. If students don’t need the printed copy to absorb the information, we save the material and environmental costs.

Coursepacks Most Cost-Effective for Printed Instructional Materials

Material the instructor provides can be most efficiently printed in large batches on professional printing equipment if you work with the Copyright and Coursepacks Office, 650-7435. Coursepacks can then be offered for sale in Western’s A.S. Bookstore. This is especially true for large classes and/or large amounts of printed material. The student print quota is provided to accommodate the production of a student’s own work; it is not intended for printing extensive course materials. The printers in the computer labs do not approach the cost-efficiency of the professional high-speed printing used for coursepacks.

The article above is a synopsis of articles published in ATUS News, Spring 2009. For more specific details on how faculty members can facilitate a decrease student printing please see
http://west.wwu.edu/atus_news_online/spring2009/01.shtml.

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