Green Article
Published May 30, 2007 at 12:05 pm · Filed under Features
Is your office drowning in paper? Are the output trays of your
printers overflowing with orphan pages from print jobs? Do urgent
prints become mixed up with uncollected ones and need to be
reprinted? Are you wasting paper, ink and toner by printing
unnecessary images and text?
Hayden Hamilton, founder of GreenPrint, became so frustrated by these
problems when working for Ford Motor Company that he decided to do
something about it.
On the basis that many of the pages left in output trays consist of
disclaimers on email messages, web addresses, company logos and other
superfluous elements, he decided to develop filtering software that
would remove such items from print jobs.
“Green Print is like a spam filter for printing, Hamilton
explains. “When you print something it looks for certain
characteristics to leave out.
Because what people want to print is subjective, the software has a
print preview that displays all pages on-screen simultaneously, with
excised elements highlighted in red. The user can reinstate any of
these with just a click of the mouse.
As well as reducing the number of unnecessary pages printed,
GreenPrint can be used to cut print costs by removing images. “A lot
of images aren’t useful and use up a lot of ink, says Hamilton.
“By right clicking on an image you can eliminate it from the page or
you can choose to remove all images from the print job as a whole.
Another of Hamilton’s favourite features is the PDF creator. “A
lot of people print when what they really want to do is save,” he
explains. “For example, it is not always easy to save an internet
page in the way that it appears, so people try and print it. At the
print preview, we have a one-click PDF creator that lets you make a
PDF of exactly what you see on-screen.
Green Print has enormous benefits for home users trying to make
expensive inkjet cartridges last longer. It is also of great value to
businesses wanting to reduce paper consumption for productivity,
environmental (see box) and financial reasons.
The enterprise version includes additional features, including a
Recycle Printer button, which allows administrators to designate a
specific printer for draft printing on paper that has already been
printed on one side, and a CO2 calculator, which shows GreenPrint’s
effect on carbon emissions, in addition to standard reports showing
how much money, ink and paper has been saved.
This makes GreenPrint very useful for organisations with
environmental and CSR obligations, as well as those who are only
interested in financial savings.
“Lexmark in Europe looked at 2,800 users and calculated that office
workers produce 10,000 prints a year and approximately 6% is waste.
Another study by Citigroup projected that each page wasted has a
total cost of 6-13 cents. So you are looking at savings of several
million dollars per year for a Fortune 500 company, says Hamilton.
It’s hard to argue with such figures, whatever one’s views on the
environment.
