*NEWS*RICOH/LEXMARK:ENVIRONMENTAL CLAIMS

[Anonymous]

InfoPrint and Lexmark lead market initiatives aimed at going green.
Businesses
must pay more attention to how they print and how printer hardware and
consumables can impact the environment, regulatory compliance and
effect their bottom line.This is the message coming from separate
announcements made this week by InfoPrint Solutions Company and Lexmark
International.InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM
and Ricoh, announced Dec 4 the launch of its sustainability strategy
and a new team to support it, headed by Joe Czyszczewski, who has just
been appointed the company’s chief sustainability officer.The purpose
of the team is to align the business and green objectives of its
production and general office customers, taking advantage of existing
environmental accounting programs and concepts from
Ricoh.Sustainability, according to Czyszczewski, represents a change in
focus from just economic impact or regulatory compliance to a
combination of economic, environmental and social factors.”Using a
sustainability point of view will drive more innovation,” he said. For
example, Czyszczewski suggested, transpromos—transactions with
promotions—can reduce junk mail by using less paper and be more useful
to recipients, by having custom-targeted ads or other
information.Czyszczewski also cited a Gartner study that claimed
eliminating banner pages (a front sheet with the user and job name, for
example) can cut printing consumables by up to 20 percent. Furthermore,
30 percent could be saved on print costs by right-sizing the output
fleet—matching printer and MFP (multifunction printing) device
capacities and locations to user requirements. Another study, from the
Australian Green House Office, showed that copying or printing an image
uses 10 times more energy than manufacturing that sheet of
paper—reducing paper consumption through duplex (using both sides of
the paper), two-up and other techniques has a significant
sustainability impact.Given that, according to a Gartner report, most
companies spend one to three percent of their revenue on print, and
cutting print costs by up to a third or more can mean significant
bottom line savings.Sustainability also takes into account other
initiatives, said Czyszczewski, such as supply chain and life cycle
assessment. Businesses now need to consider what happens to returned
cartridges, replaced parts and old machines and think about getting
that chain-of-custody certification from the Forest Stewardship Council
that shows a company is printing from paper logged from a well-managed
forest.”I’ve recently seen contracts that said, ‘You need an
environmental policy to do business with us,’ and asking ‘Do you intend
to follow industry standards?'” said Czyszczewski. “We’re starting to
see some teeth put into this.”

Lexmark has also made
announcement this week, encouraging small and midsize businesses to do
smarter printing. The printer vendor said printing more effectively can
help SMBs by reducing environmental impact and saving money. Smarter
printing would include printing duplex, which cuts paper use in half;
using print preview to look for ways to reformat; and correcting errors
to avoid printing pages unnecessarily.Also SMBs should purchase
recycled paper and make sure they dispose of toner cartridges and
printers no longer in use in a responsible manner, Lexmark said.The
vendor’s Cartridge Collection Program offers a free and environmentally
responsible way to discard empty inkjet cartridges. Users just need to
ask the vendor for a postage paid return bag. The vendor also gives
participants one free ink cartridge for every five empty cartridges
they return to Lexmark for recycling in a 12-month period. The printers
themselves can also be returned to the vendor for recycling.

[Author]

January 2, 2008 at 2:10 PM