Print Greener by Cutting Waste and Reducing Unnecessary Printing

Corporate
To a large extent, green printing is less printing. The page that never gets printed is the greenest page of all. Pharos Systems offers both technology and services to help your organization print less. We take a holistic, integrated approach to print optimization that goes far beyond monitoring devices or users; it’s about doing everything possible to change behavior and business processes, away from a reliance on paper.

A key component of our approach is Pharos Blueprint® Enterprise software, which offers a number of applications to foster green printing. One of them is Policy Print™, which enables organizations to communicate with users at the time of print to encourage (or require) eco-friendly printing decisions, such as printing 2-sided or not printing particularly large documents. Another is Secure Release Here®, which gives employees a second chance at the printer to decide what they really need to print.

But software is not sufficient to achieve or maintain a sustainable printing environment. This is why we offer services as well as technology. Pharos dedicated onsite print specialists are change agents for eco-friendly printing. They use fact-based reporting at the user, job, and device level, in concert with Lean Six Sigma process methodology, to continuously identify ways to reduce print volumes, improve workflows, and influence end user printing behavior. They have implemented successful "intelligent printing" campaigns for many of our customers that have significantly reduced unnecessary printing and waste.

Government
Pharos helps government agencies with their sustainability initiatives by significantly reducing printing waste because users release only the jobs they really need, unreleased jobs are eventually deleted by the system, and banner pages are unnecessary. Pharos Blueprint® Enterprise with Toner Saving Policy also decreases the amount of toner and toner cartridges an agency may go through within a year, impacting the environment in a positive way by reducing waste from consumables.

With Policy Print, Pharos technology meets each government agency’s individual objectives for saving money and printing greener through informed and responsible user printing behavior. It communicates and enforces your agency’s policies for reducing printing costs and limiting printing waste. Easy-to-understand messages are displayed to employees when they submit a print job that is not in line with agency guidelines. Policy Print helps create an agency culture of responsible printing by giving employees the information and a choice of actions at the most opportune time — before their documents are released to a printer.

Education
Colleges and universities have taken a leadership role in environmental initiatives, conserving energy and water, using renewable energy sources, integrating native ecosystems into campus landscaping, building green buildings, and making recycling part of everyday life.

Still, the average college student generates over a hundred pounds of paper waste per year. Recycling this waste is very important, but it’s only part of the solution. The other part is preventing paper waste from being generated in the first place.

This is where Pharos Systems comes in. Our print optimization solutions enable students, faculty, administration, and staff to make responsible printing decisions — to print only what they really need. As a result, campuses generate dramatically less printing waste, eliminating the mountains of unclaimed printouts and overflowing blue bins that are associated with unmanaged printing.

Here’s a typical Pharos success story. One of our college customers reported a 93% reduction in paper usage in their main computer lab the day after Pharos Uniprint® was rolled out: from 20,000 sheets of paper per day to 1500 sheets.

Pharos solutions can foster green printing anywhere print happens on campus: not only in computer labs and libraries but also in administrative offices and academic departments.

Libraries
The mission of Pharos Systems is to make every print an intelligent decision. One way we do it is by reducing the amount of unnecessary printing that people do, thereby preventing paper waste from being generated. This is good for the environment, not only because it saves trees. The pulp and paper industry is the largest consumer of process water and the third largest consumer of energy in the U.S.

Pharos technology eliminates unnecessary printing in libraries by providing patrons with a second chance at the printer to decide what they really need to print. Very often when people are doing online research, the first several articles they find (and print) are not as useful as material they find later. Without a Pharos solution, every document they send to a library printer will be printed, and some will be thrown out immediately. With Pharos Secure Release Here® technology, patrons can walk up to any printer, review all the jobs they’ve submitted, and select the ones they really need to print. It reduces paper waste — and saves patrons money.