The Refinishing Touch Blog

There are areas where you can easily understand it's more difficult to plan and take action to cut costs, and others that would seem easy and simple to cut back. So we were amazed to see this survey that calculated that the federal government spends $1.3 billion on printing every year, and that $440 million of this is wasted and unnecessary printing.

The researchers, working on behalf of printer vendor Lexmark and O'Keeffe and Co., surprisingly found no differences between generations when it comes to thinking about the environment.

Generation Y employees stated they printed 29 pages a day, and threw or recycled less than a third (31%) on that day, while the baby boomers surveyed gave similar figures, saying they printed 31 pages a day on average, and threw or recycled 34% on the same day.

The study also found that 89% of respondents said their agencies don't have formal printing policies to cut back on printing. This figure didn't surprise us every much as our findings from our own research into policies and procurement processes within government (link to TRT download site) found that agencies can save up to eighty percent of current expenditure on furniture assets from a commitment to sustainability initiatives and a more innovative use of funds and resources.

Sustainability needs to be considered at every level: from the acquisition of hundreds of desks, to the printing of a single piece of paper. It all makes a difference.

Labels: government, printing, Sustainability