The Answer is £800 per person per year.

The question, in true Douglas Adams style, is a lot more difficult to ask correctly. What we are concerned about here is the amount that our current printing habits cost us and how much we could save by changing them.

The answer to that one is up to 75% – maybe even more – and here’s how it works.

The majority of offices now work with full colour laser printing facilities. The simple choice is to move everybody from colour back to mono. Additional benefit can also result from enforcing duplex as the standard printing option. You must note that what you are also looking for a change in employee behaviour, which is more difficult to achieve, but I’ve got a few ideas on how that might work as well which I’ll deal with at the end of this article.

Moving to a world of black and white double-sided printing will save you money in two ways – less paper, less toner. There are some other less easily measurable benefits but these two alone are enough to make a compelling case.

Here comes the maths bit – the majority of headline numbers that I read are never explicit about the numbers used to arrive at the conclusions offered. You should be able to follow my working assumptions quite clearly and certainly challenge or change them as you wish to arrive at a result that works for you. The basic formula for calculation should be sound though.

So assume 25 people in an office using a mid-range workgroup size printer. Those 25 users print an average of 30 sides of information per working day (in a single sided world this means 30 sheets of paper). Assume an average of 220 working days a year (excluding weekends and bank holidays.

So in 1 year this office of 25 people will print 165,000 sides of information. If they print single sided then that means 165,000 separate sheets of paper. If a ream of paper (80gsm2 white) is 500 sheets and they cost about £4.00 each then that means this office consumes 330 reams of paper a year (165,000/500) at a cost of £1,320.

Just printing on duplex doesn’t automatically mean that we can assume that you’re going to half your paper costs. Based on nothing more empirical than personal experience I’d say that a 40% reduction is a fair assumption to make – you don’t necessarily use both sides every time you print after all. So a saving of 40% on £1,320 is £528.

Now that’s not something to break out the champagne over, unless you are a really large company. I work for a large multinational with 2,000 employees so if they implemented it they could expect a saving of about £40,000 which is worthwhile in its own right.

Its when you start looking at toner costs that the really big numbers start making an appearance.

Using the same basic assumptions as we did for paper we add the following. A colour printer uses 4 separate cartridges. They are good for an average of 2200 normal pages of printing (so if you use PowerPoint a lot then expect it to be a lot less). Given that you print 165,000 normal pages in a year, that means you consume a total of 300 cartridges every year. Each cartridge costs about £65. That means you spend an average of £19,500 every year on toner alone.

So how much of an impact does going mono have ? Well if you print in black and white you only use one cartridge instead of 4 – so roughly you will see a 75% reduction in toner costs every year – so £14,625 every year.

Again to look at it from a big company perspective – with 2,000 employees that means a reduction of £1,170,000 cost every year.

If you add in the paper savings then the model office would save £15,153 every year. A large company would save an equivalent of £1,210,000.

If you’ve read my introduction to the Green Office series of articles on this site then you’ll know that one of the factors that I take into account is the impact that green cost savings can have on a company’s profitability.

If you assume that a company with 2000 employees has a turnover of about £220 million and makes an average profit of 10% then a cost saving of £1.21 million will have a direct positive impact of 0.55% on that company’s profitability. To put it into perspective if you were to try to achieve a similar increase in profits (by value not percentage) then you would need to sell an additional £12.1 million of goods and services – and that’s not as good for your company and its shareholders as increasing percentage profit.

Unfortunately its not as simple as waving your magic IT wand and suddenly moving everybody over to mono and duplex. As any manager will tell you its easy to make a policy change, its much harder to enforce that policy in order to get the benefits you want from the change. The real key to it all is changing employee behaviour.

The problem is that although duplex is an easy one – not many people care about double sided printing – weaning people off colour is much more of a problem. Powerpoint relies on colour differences, track changes on a word document are only readable properly if you can see the changes in glorious technicolour. At work there are probably only 10% of employees who don’t change from mono to colour every time they print – even though the default is set to mono so you have to manually intervene.

So how do you get them to help you – and they are the only ones who can. As with all of these things the best way of getting them to change is to give them an incentive to do so.

One idea that we’re looking at is moving everybody on to large widescreen monitors. It’s been noted that people print a lot less if they have a larger workspace on their monitor – it’s easier to compare documents side by side – text is larger and more readable so there is less of a need to print in order to check formatting.

If you calculate this in purely monetary terms a potential saving of £15,000 could be achieved by offering your staff a bigger screen as a result of their active participation. Funnily enough people see this as a real perk (the gadget loving west strikes again) and it helps you increase productivity at the same time as reducing costs. In fact we are expecting to see a further reduction in the amount of printing our staff need to do as a larger screen actually seems to reduce the demand. That’s a bit harder to measure and quantify – but it seems a reasonable assumption.

If 25 new 22″ widescreen monitors cost £5,000 (£200 per monitor) then I’m still net up £10,000 at the end of the year – and then gets better every year. Make the new screens contingent on achieving the printing reductions and you should give your staff all the incentive they need to help you achieve the change you need.

There are some further more intangible benefits that I can think of as a result of the change in your printing habits, which you can throw in as ancillary benefits and they all help your case when you try to sell it to management

Reduction in paper waste

Reduction in storage costs

Reduction in energy costs

Reduction in the cost of new printers – mono costs less than colour after all.

Overall its a compelling case on economic grounds let alone environmental ones. Change the assumptions above and see what you can come up with it should be an easy argument to win with everyone.