OEM 'S TOOT THEIR OWN HORNS ABOUT RECYCLING IN ASIA

[Anonymous]

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,62055367,00.htm
Printer vendors push green for cheap
Adhering
to be environmental-friendly is not only a corporate social
responsibility, it also contributes to the company’s bottom line. As
organizations try to attain these twin objectives, printer
manufacturers are jumping in to offer their range of “green” products.
According
to printer manufacturers, the path to going green and printing cheap
starts at the product design stage. For instance, these hardware makers
say they observe a conscious effort to produce printers that require
fewer resources, namely, electricity, supplies and media.Lim Kok Hin,
Canon Singapore’s senior director and general manager of domestic
business imaging solutions and business solutions division, said
multifunction devices (MFD), for example, are designed to allow
businesses to consume less energy.”With the rising cost of energy, this
quickly translates into tremendous savings for companies,” Lim told
ZDNet Asia in an e-mail. Kasai Yasuhiro, Epson’s director of regional
product management division, said its printing products were designed
with “stringent energy and resource consumption targets, in relation to
performance”.Older models are also replaced with new designs that make
better use of resource. The vendor’s Stylus C110 business inkjet
printer, for example, consumes 60 percent less energy than its
predecessor Epson Stylus 87+, Kasai told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail.Its
business laser printers, from standby or sleep mode, can complete
printing the first page in 8 seconds. This minimizes the time the
machine needs to be powered for print jobs, thus, reducing energy
consumption, he said. “This is especially important as most print jobs
are typically short runs comprising two to five pages,” he said.Ivy
Liang, Asia-Pacific and Japan vice president of marketing at HP’s
imaging and printing group, said the company’s “Instant-on Technology”
is embedded in most of its LaserJet printers, enabling the machines to
print the first page in 7.5 seconds from sleep mode.According to
Canon’s Lim, companies tend to focus on larger business processes in
their bid to achieve cost savings, leaving office printing costs
unmanaged. Most are unaware how much their organizations are spending
on their printing needs, he said.”Unmanaged print costs comprise 1
percent to 3 percent of a company’s revenue,” he noted, citing numbers
from a February 2008 Gartner report. “Most organizations can experience
significant cost savings with proper management of print processes.”

Duplex printing saves cost
Double-sided,
or duplex printing is an effective component of a properly managed
print policy, Lim said. Referring to the Gartner study, he said
organizations can potentially reduce annual paper costs by at least 30
percent across their output by printing on both sides as part of the
standard work process.Kasai noted that before an organization can enjoy
such cost savings, all printers deployed in a company must support
duplex capability and there must be a policy enforcing the use of
duplex printing. “In some companies, this policy is forcibly imposed by
IT administrators who set their printers to print duplex by default,”
he said.

For HP, duplex printing helped the IT vendor cut its
paper use by 25 percent during a pilot test, Liang said. The company is
further tweaking its printing infrastructure to achieve the best cost
savings, and expects to reduce its paper consumption by 800 tons
annually when it has completed this initiative, she added.However,
Graeme Philipson, research director at Connected Research, noted that
while duplex printing may have its place in some circumstances, it may
often be inappropriate in others. He added that it may even add to
printing costs and the organization’s carbon footprint.In an e-mail
interview, Philipson said studies have shown paper consumption
represents only about 10 percent of total print costs. “That means
duplex printing is addressing only 10 percent of the problem,” he
said.He added that printers that support duplex printing also cost
more, which may negate the cost advantage over the lifespan of the
printer. Since their mechanisms are more complex, they are more likely
to fail and need added maintenance that could be more expensive, said
Philipson.

Reuse and recycle
Another avenue to save costs is
through recycling, a practice that major printer vendors are advocating
through their green programs.

Epson, for example, runs
collection and recycling programs in 25 markets including Japan, South
Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Canon also has in
place a global recycling program for used toner cartridges. In
Singapore, for example, the company has four recycling locations for
customers to drop off their used cartridges. Alternatively, businesses
can arrange for used toner cartridges to be collected from their
offices, provided they have at least 10 cartridges.

[Author]

June 23, 2009 at 12:08 PM