Gaia Print Charger will greatly reduce paper wastage by making people think twice before they reach for the print button.  Until you make those who print accountable, the cost of printing consumables will continue to escalate. After ten years of saving printing resources in schools across Australia and around the world, Gaia Computing want to encourage the commercial sector and Government offices to do their BIT to help the planet and all of us who want to continue living on it. 

In education, the schools throw the responsibility onto the individual user (students, teachers and/or parents) by providing an allocation for the year’s/semester’s work and charging the individual for each page printed.  When the allocation is exhausted funds must be replenished before they can print again.  Teachers do not have to pay; but all printing is charged to a department and that department has to manage its own printing budget.

In a commercial structure costs can be charged to departments and in some case (legal, accounting, architectural offices) defrayed to individual clients or even down to individual matters/contracts/jobs for that client. The effect of this accountability for paper usage is that users are more conscious of potential wastage.  This reduces the amount of paper printed, the number of cartridges purchased, the amount of electricity to run the printer and the life of the printer is extended dramatically.  The life of the paper tree forests will be extended as will the life of the landfill.  With all of these things taken into account, you will have indirectly reduced harmful carbon emissions and green-house gasses quite a BIT.  If every company in the world did their BIT, collectively, the difference would be absolutely amazing.

“But where do I start?”  ”How can one person make a difference?” 

You can start by downloading Gaia Print Charger and setting up a test environment on your busiest printer and doing some reports after a few weeks usage just to see who is printing what.  If there is no wastage happening in your organization then I have wasted half an hour of your time and for that I apologize.  However, I am not expecting to get many irate phone calls from IT managers and those who control the budgets.  Your users might be unhappy when you catch them rorting the bosses printing facilities or if their personal laser, which averages 500 pages per cartridge, is relocated so the organization gets full value (2,500 pages) out of each cartridge. 

With a visible cost associated with future printing, users are more likely to proof read and correct their work on screen rather than on paper since this will avoid spending money or eating into allocated budgets.  With the responsibility passed to the end user your cost of consumables will be greatly reduced.  Hundreds of success stories from Gaia users attest to the savings that can be achieved by installing Gaia Print Charger.

Are you doing your BIT to save our world? Or should that be Am I doing my BIT to save my world? For further information please contact: - John H. Denham, GAIA Computing P/L, www.gaiacomputing.com.au Ph +61 3 5444 9588 Fx +61 3 5443 2847

“Recycling paper not only reduces the amount of waste to landfill, it also contributes to sustainable resource usage. For each tonne of paper that is recycled, almost 13 trees, 2.5 barrels of oil, 4100 kWh of electricity, 4 cubic metres of landfill and 31,780 litres of water are saved.” Sustainability Victoria’s website “Paper Use and Printing“ page dated 29/07/2006