Three ways to improve your office printing practices

With many modern office environments making the move towards a paperless system, now is the ideal time to evaluate your office's printing practices. To get you started, check out these three ways your office can improve its printing practices.

Go green 

Improving the environmentally friendliness of your office's printing practices will help save trees, energy and emissions while also saving your business money. There are a variety of ways that your office can make printing a more sustainable exercise, including:

• Using environmentally-friendly, soy-based ink
• Printing on recycled, chemical-free paper
• Using both sides of the paper for printing
• Reusing and recycling waste paper
• Reusing and recycling printer cartridges
• Purchasing printers with high energy efficiency.

For more advice and assistance on purchasing recycled paper, soy-based ink or energy-efficient printers, contact your local printer service professionals.

Preserve important documents

Born-digital objects are inherently very fragile, as they rely wholly on software, hardware and storage media for ongoing access and preservation. While digital preservation is gaining popularity in larger organisations, many small companies do not have a digital preservation strategy that is actively practiced to ensure important data is not lost in the future. Without a concerted effort to migrate, refresh and correctly store digital copies, businesses and individuals alike are at risk of data loss for born-digital documents and files. Consequently, archiving of printed copies is still a viable, simple and cost-effective digital preservation strategy. If your office does not actively enforce a comprehensive digital preservation strategy and has no plans to do so in the near future, printing is the ideal way to preserve important documents in the interim.

Conduct a print audit

To improve your office's printing practices, you should begin by gaining an in-depth understanding of current habits, equipment and machinery. As such, it is highly recommended that your office conducts a comprehensive print audit to highlight areas where environmental and financial improvements can be made. In so doing, you may uncover ways that you can reduce paper wastage, increase recycling, and create a more energy-efficient printing environment in your office. For an expert evaluation of your office's current printing practices, it is highly recommended that you have your local printing service professionals conduct a print audit. They will be equipped with the current knowledge and skills to help your office achieve an ecologically and financially sustainable printing practice.

For more information on how to optimise your office printing practices, contact your local printing service professionals today.