Printing Volumes and Efforts to Reduce the Numbers
Printing is one of the biggest ongoing expenses of any school. Not to mention it produces huge amounts of waste and is one of the many contributors to the deforestation of national and state parks.
Reducing print usage should be on the top of the list for any educational institute, but not at the expense of it’s student’s success.
Throughout 2016, we printed a total of 1564.45 pages per student.
We thought this was particularly high, so in an attempt to compare our usage to other schools, we decided to survey a handful of Victorian Schools on the same data.
Out of the 29 schools we surveyed, only 6 were willing to provide data. We found that these schools printed an average of 1415.49 pages per student over the school calendar year.
To gauge where you might sit compared to these schools, you can follow the trend-line in the graph below based on your total enrolments. For example, if we look at a school of 750 students on the graph we can see where the red line is placed at about 714, 286 pages. This is an example of what most schools are currently printing.
Where does your school fall - above or below the red line?
How do we reduce these numbers?
Out of all the schools we surveyed there were two reoccurring solutions which seemed to have a positive impact:
- Cloud document solutions (Google Docs/Office365)
- Printing control solutions and tap and release
And while these solutions are a good start, there are many applications for printed paper which just cannot be substituted.
The idea is not to put a restriction on printing, but to make schools aware of their volumes, while providing other mediums to which they can use in its place place where they deem appropriate.
We want to encourage schools to release this information, as ugly as it may be, because without measuring our impact we can’t improve on it.
Please feel free to share your thoughts and data on your printing.
