Education budgets per student are at the lowest they have been for several years. Recent estimates are that the average secondary school pupil produces 22kg of waste each year, with primary schools wasting a staggering 45kg per pupil - most of which comes from paper and card. Here, Simon Riley, Sales Director at Direct-tec provides advice to tech departments in the education sector on how they can reduce wastage caused through excess printing.
Excess printing is a huge financial burden on educational institutions and the majority of paper waste occurs from users printing to a device and then forgetting, or simply not bothering, to collect their documents. By using a print management solution, school administrators can track printing, copying and scanning activities by user, device or department. This allows them to monitor usage patterns and costs and take appropriate action when necessary.
One school we have been working with, which has 80 staff and around 600 pupils, saved over £ 4.5K in one quarter, a significant amount for a relatively small school. This saving resulted from jobs being sent to print that were not released – previously they would have been printed. If you add to this the amount of paper that was also saved, this particular school was able to cut their print and paper costs by over £6K per quarter. This was a relatively small school, so larger mainstream schools and colleges stand to make even greater savings.
Many schools are implementing this approach already. There are additional ways educational institutions can make significant savings. These include the use of LED lighting in classrooms, which reduce energy bills, proving pupils with big pads and making more use of the cloud. Processes have changed in recent years, with pupils now able to download homework and coursework, so the need for paper and print is now much lower than in previous years. That said, we are still seeing an increase in printing volumes. Solutions such as PaperCut can at least control mono and colour use. The ability to implement quotas and restrict where and when mono, colour and duplex printing can take place has been proven to facilitate significant cost savings.
