Xerox has built an application to help people use fewer copiers and printers.
Called the Xerox Sustainability Calculator, the application allows businesses to figure out what sort of cost savings and environmental improvements can be had by reducing the amount of equipment installed.
The company's research shows that printing devices are used only between 1 and 2 percent of the time. Companies can save between 20 percent and 30 percent on what they spend by reducing equipment to an optimal number, said Patty Calkins, the vice president of environment, health, and safety at Xerox.
The company's Sustainability Calculator translates changes to environmental impact over the lifecycle of equipment including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, solid waste, as well as air and water use.
Xerox' Sustainability Calculator: "Greening" your office through efficiency.
(Credit: Xerox)Xerox consultants use a high-end edition for large organizations. The company is also making a free one available online. The application will be available online beginning Tuesday.
Xerox has a long tradition of environmental stewardship. The company introduced equipment in the early 1980s that could power itself down, which helped lead to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star rating program. But the reason that it developed a service to use fewer copiers and printers is because its business has shifted away from selling consumables to offering services, according to Calkins.
"Our service offering is about efficiency. And inefficiency is waste, which typically has an environmental impact," she said.
How green are your printing habits?
(Credit: GreenPrint)A free flavor of GreenPrint software that enables people to waste less paper when printing became available Monday.
The new application, GreenPrint World, detects and highlights unwanted content, such as banner ads on a Web page, that tends to spill over onto extra pages. It also lets users delete images from the printed page and quickly create print-friendly PDF documents. The GreenPrint interface appears when users print from any program.
The software displays the amount of paper, money, and greenhouse gases users could be saving. GreenPrint estimates that regular usage may save up to $90 each year, the equivalent of more than 1,400 pages. GreenPrint aspires for widespread adoption of its product to spare 100 million trees from being chopped down and 300 million tons of greenhouse gases from polluting the atmosphere.
Only the paid Home Premium and Enterprise versions of GreenPrint offer faster-loading, ad-free print previews as well as tech support via e-mail and telephone. At this point the app is only available for Windows computers.
GreenPrint also sells the first "green" font, called EverGreen, for $10. It's supposed to take up one-fifth less white space than Arial, Helvetica, or Times New Roman. The company aims to design more fonts.
In November, GreenPrint partnered with Xerox 8560 and 8860 business laser printers. Xerox claims that its solid ink printers create 90 percent less waste than rival laser printers.
Canon, meanwhile, is aiming to outdo competitors by tacking a green label on the packages of its new printers.
Canon printers will soon arrive in stores with a green label flaunting eco-friendly features including energy conservation and recycled materials. The company's "Generation Green" brand will mark Pixma and Selphy photo inkjets as well as the laser ImageClass lines of printers.
"Printers are the one area where you can really improve the environment," said Canon spokesman Justin Joseph. "Their production is a massive undertaking that requires a lot of raw materials, and we've found so many ways to reduce that."
Some inks will be encased in NatureStone biodegradable packs made from limestone rather than wood pulp. User manuals are to be printed on 70 percent recycled paper, and recycled plastics will make up the power supply casings for the Pixma line.
Modular product designs have helped to reduce the size of boxes by 20 percent. Instead of styrofoam, air-filled baggies cushion the products during shipping. The packaging changes alone will halve greenhouse gas emissions, nearly halve the energy needed to make it, and reduce the use of petroleum by 65 percent, according to Canon.
Nine in 10 Canon printers already automatically flip over pages for double sided-printing, saving paper. Canon has offered free mail-in recycling for laser printer toner for several years but lacks a disposal program for inkjet printer cartridges.
The printers comply with the EPA's Energy Star guidelines and with European rules governing the use of toxic materials.
Other than Energy Star, there are no industrywide consumer labels to mark printers and other consumer electronics as eco-friendly. Joseph said the highly competitive nature of the industry largely prevents printer makers from creating a common "green" standard.
Printer companies are under attack as more people become concerned about global warming and toxic pollution.
The solution? "Printer Vendors Need to Greenwash Their Image."
That unfortunate headline was the theme of an e-mail newsletter this morning from Lyra Research, a well-respected firm that tracks the digital imaging industry.
Apparently the writer didn't realize or care that "greenwashing" is a negative term. It describes how companies aiming to appeal to treehuggers are painting a green face, without necessarily cleaning up their act.
Picky consumers detest this trend, which makes it nearly impossible to tell which companies walk the green walk instead of merely spouting a green talk. Earlier this decade, greenwashing wasn't so insidious because most claims of eco-friendliness were made by small enterprises, like, say, your local weaver of organic hemp hacky sacks.
But now that the world's biggest corporations aim to appear green--sincerely or cynically--it's easy to be fooled by multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns.
This year, printer hardware is expected to contribute 1 million tons of solid waste in this country alone, while pulp and paper companies are the fourth-largest toxic polluters of water, according to Lyra.
The Lyra newsletter asked, "What can the industry do to prevent an attack by environmental groups and create a better image for itself?"
To start, the industry could gain some friends by reworking its razor cartridge model of ink replacement. I learned quickly--through reviewing printers for CNET--how much people hate that the cost of ink and toner quickly exceeds the price of the printer itself. Vendors insist that people use their premium-price, branded inks or suffer crummy-looking pages. And disposing of cartridges is a pain, even if you're organized enough to mail them in or bring them to stores, such as Walgreen's, for reuse.
Also, how about better tech support and repair? Fixing gadgets should be no harder than taking a cracked heel to the shoe cobbler. The tech industry overall should make better-quality, longer-lasting hardware. A printer that cranks out one page faster per minute than last season's model is not efficient. A printer that lasts but a year and costs more to fix than replace is not sustainable.
Yes, people at HP and most other printer companies have made sincere efforts to establish responsible recycling programs. They've also made more models Energy Star efficient, experimented with corn-based plastic and modular components, and made it easier to print on two sides of a page to reduce paper waste. You might even argue that personal photo printers are kinder to the planet than traditional lab photofinishing.
Still, what's the secret sauce in all that proprietary ink and toner? Materials safety data sheets that companies are required by law to report do not detail the little-tested toxicity of these chemical cocktails. The information is limited largely because American laws regulating potentially dangerous chemicals are notoriously weak.
It took independent testing by an Australian lab to root out potentially cancerous, asthma-inducing ingredients in laser toner.
I don't want to breathe in that noxious dust at my desk, and I certainly don't want to breathe in the hot air of greenwashing. Let's hope that tech companies boast of small successes in moving toward sustainability without getting ahead of themselves.
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