Have you wondered how office machines impact the environment?
It’s a hot topic right now and many multifunction device (MFD) industry leaders are equipping their machines with settings that help conserve supplies and energy. There is still room for improvement so that as an industry, we make the best possible efforts to protect our environment. Along with our customers who are implementing environmentally friendly practices in the workplace that help to decrease the impact on the environment.
Moving from paper to cloud with OCR
Sure, the nature of the MFD and printing industry has always been surrounded by concerns of improper disposal of toner and ink cartridges and paper waste. Very valid concerns, thankfully the ushering in of the digital age and a jump in digital media is helping. MFDs are being produced with the ability to scan to email and if they are not able to do so, PaperCut and Umango can be applied to take over that task. “Hard” copies are becoming a think of the past.
Feature with both these software’s allow users to receive an electronic image of the document and either email to several destinations or store in a cloud environment rather than handing out hard copies to various people. Umango even lets you edit the digital image as soon as you receive it!
What to do with the toner cartridges?
Good question! Just the thought that tons of toxic ingredients in toner and plastics from the cartridges are causing damage to the environment should motivate many companies to find a recycling program to lessen this type of waste. Your office can organize a program that would collect used cartridges and either ship them or drop them off at recycling points.
Manufacturers also offer programs to help recycle cartridges like drop off points or return labels with paid shipping so that these can be returned for recycling or reuse.
Be an Educated Consumer
Ultimately, it’s up to the consumer to act conscientiously and take advantage of recycling programs. As mentioned, there are ink and toner manufactures that provide options to recycle toner and cartridges. They take advantage of the opportunity to reuse cartridges, saving themselves money as well as decreasing the environmental footprint of their products.
ecoprintQ is a PaperCut certified authorized solution center that is also partnered with Umango. As an authorized solution center, we’re here for all of your print, copy, scan, and fax needs. For more information on PaperCut or Umango software, or what we can do to help you get started, email us at sales@ecoprintq.com or give us a call at 800-236-8499.
DataMaster Lab / Printer-Benchmark.com GREEN Award launches July 17. A multifunction’s impact on the environment depends on how it is manufactured, how much waste it produces, how much energy it consumes and the carbon footprint made by its distribution and support requirements. Electrical consumption is easy to measure, and varies a great deal between the machines we look at. Even a fast toner machine’s electrical consumption represents a small cost – single figures in euros or dollars per month. But consider this: the shorter the lifetime of a consumable, the more waste and the more travelling required to keep the machine running. Consider the pile of empty consumables a machine makes. Consider the toxicity of the contents and the electronics in a landfill site. Consider how far they have travelled to get dumped there a few weeks later. So machines with small toner or ink cartridges do not do well in DataMaster Lab’s Environmental evaluations. Other aspects of a machine can have an impact on the customer’s working environment – noise and emissions, for example, so we include these too.