RICOH: UK's PRINTING PRACTICES ARE THE WORST IN EUROPE

[Anonymous]

RICOH: UK’s PRINTING PRACTICES
ARE THE WORST IN EUROPE
The UK is the worst country in Europe for sustainable
printing, with companies wasting up to five percent of their turnover in
printout, according to research by Ricoh
The UK’s
adoption of sustainable document strategies is the worst in Europe,
according to new research by printing specialist Ricoh, suggesting that
British enterprises are unaware of the potential to use green practices
to cut costs.Ricoh’s Document Governance Index – which assigns a
numerical value to environmental aspects of document governance such as
recycling, setting targets, auditing and employee behaviours – placed
the UK in seventh place out of seven, scoring only 38.5 out of a
possible 100.

France came top the league with 43.5 percent,
followed by Italy (42.7 percent) and Germany (41.7 percent). However,
none of the countries surveyed scored more than 50 percent of the total,
suggesting that there is still significant room for improvement in
sustainable printing strategies across Europe.

According to the
report, most European organisations are failing to centralise their
document governance, with only 33 percent of companies claiming to have
implemented a fully developed strategy to deal with paper and energy
wastage. This means that many companies are overlooking tactical actions
they can take, not only to improve sustainability but to reduce costs
as well.

Paper wastage is one of the highest costs to businesses,
with the total spend on document management in Europe currently
exceeding 14 billion euros per year – up to five percent of annual
turnover. Despite this, 32 percent of business leaders allow employees
to do what they like with regard to duplex printing (printing on both
sides of the paper) and 19 percent are either still in the planning
stages or have no plans to implement a duplex printing policy. Only 18
percent have implemented a such a policy company-wide.

One of the
main obstacles for companies attempting to develop a green printing
strategy is a lack of awareness among employees. The report found that
almost half (47 percent) of European business leaders are unfamiliar
with their company’s recycling policy and 40 percent with their toner
recycling policy.

“Despite sustainability being an important
fixture on the business agenda, and documents making up an essential
part of day-to-day business operations, there remains a lack of
awareness of the role that document governance can play in driving both
environmental and business efficiencies,” said Tom Wagland, manager of
Ricoh’s Environmental Management Group. “Businesses need to act now by
taking some simple steps to improve the way they are managing and
controlling their document workflows.”

One of the ways that Ricoh
proposes to combat this problem is with its Pay Per Page Green
consultancy service, which it claims can highlight an organisation’s
current costs and environmental impacts and propose an optimised
solution, offering lower, visible costs, reduced environmental impacts –
on average of between 10 and 30 percent – and improve business
efficiency.

“We take a cradle-to-cradle approach to sustainable
innovation; offering products and services that contribute to
environmental preservation from design to recycling,” said Shun Sato,
vice president of Ricoh Europe in a statement in February.

Efforts
to sell green printing strategies generally rely on having fewer
printers, under tighter central control, with some sort of
“pull-printing” service so users can’t get their output without a
security token, reducing the dangers of a shared output tray. “We must
constantly be rethinking current practices in the light of new
technologies and sustainability issues,” Lexmark’s director of
sustainable affairs Béatrice Marneffe told eWEEK Europe in June.

Although
printer manufacturers’ motives are arguably mixed, since they profit
from extra output, they say customer demand is helping the sustainable
approach: “It’s not in our interest for customers to print less, but it
is our business to make a profit from what the customers want,” Graham
Long, vice president of Samsung’s European printing operation, told
eWEEK Europe in July.Earlier this year, HP launched a similar service to
that of Ricoh, which it says will cut enterprise printing costs by over
15 percent, and reduce carbon footprints, if companies sign up to a
total print service managed by HP.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/uk-s-printing-practices-are-worst-in-europe-2610

[Author]

December 21, 2009 at 10:26 AM