On-campus printing offers sustainable choices

Hundreds of computers. Thousands of students. Millions of assignments. It all adds up to an extraordinary amount of computer and printer use on IU’s campus.

The Sustainable Computing working group is on a mission to reduce the impact of that use on the environment.

The group is the creation of a partnership between the Office of Sustainability and University Information Technology Services.

“Together we have worked with administrative and academic departments to identify key needs in computing that affect the environment,” said Susan Coleman Morse, UITS Senior Communications and Sustainability Specialist.

Sustainable computing focuses on three areas: e-waste, desktop energy and print
reduction.

Because more than 97 percent of students use on-campus printers, print reduction is the easiest way for students to be sustainable in their computing.

In the 2010-2011 school year, students printed  24,867,731 pages on campus printers.

Why it matters

“Because we have such a large student body, we have to be socially minded about the overall outcome of what we do,”  said Joowon Kim, a junior and Office of Sustainability intern.

The student body prints millions of pages each year. Last school year, students printed more than 32,000,000 images on more than 24,000,000 sheets of paper at campus printing stations.

That is the equivalent of:
398 tons of paper
10,297 40-foot trees
1,313 cubic yards of landfill space
2,397,069 pounds CO2 (greenhouse gases)

What you can do

Eliminating printing is an impossibility on a college campus. But there are many simple solutions for students to be more sustainable in their paper usage.
Start with these recommendations from the Office of Sustainability:

Use electronic storage. Save documents and files to USB drives or external hard drives. Or save them online using My Workspace in Oncourse, Google Documents or Drop Box.

Read eReserves online. You can still mark up the pages and take notes using resources like Foxit Reader and Adobe Reader, which are free from IUware.

Submit assignments electronically when possible.

If you need to print

Decrease the font size and margins

Use duplex printing. It will use less of the pages you are allocated to print for free and will reduce waste.

Run spell check and use print preview. This tends to eliminate having to reprint
when you notice a mistake.

View document properties to make sure you are not printing blank or unwanted pages.

Print just once. Be patient when sending print jobs to STC printers; don’t resend the same job multiple times if your output is delayed. Report the problem to the Technology Center Consultant. If a consultant is not on site, call 812-855-3802.