London office workers cull forests for pointless printing

London office workers waste over 21 million trees a year on needless printing – trees that could be saved through using GreenPrint software to eliminate unwanted pages from print jobs.

Office workers printing emails, web pages and reports often print unnecessary end pages and other content that will remain unread. GreenPrint software analyses print jobs and highlights potentially unwanted pages. By stripping them out, print jobs run more economically, are friendlier to the environment, and save a lot of money.

According to Lexmark Ipsos survey statistics from GreenPrint, an average UK office worker prints 38 pages per day, which at 232 working days per annum is 8,816 pages annually. Unwanted pages represent 29% of this total. London offices churn out three and a quarter million tonnes of office and printing paper a year, of which 877,250 tonnes are wasted. This is equivalent to 655,000 tons of CO2 generated for no reason.

GreenpPrint says 24 trees are needed to make one tonne of paper. Thus 21,054,000 are needed just to make the paper for pointless printing.

The software is installed as a printer and intercepts a PC user's print requests. It analyses a print job and displays a multi-page view of it with possible wasteful pages highlighted in red. These can be cancelled from the print job. Users can additionally select images to be removed from pages if they wish or unwanted text items as well.

Print jobs can be turned into PDF files to avoid printing altogether if needed. The product also provides reports on its activities.

The GreenPrint product can be downloaded for a 30-day trial or purchased with prices from $70/PC (about £35 at ordinary conversion rates) for business users with volume discounts available.

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