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British offices printing out 8 mile high piles of documents. The damning truth
Date: 04/08/2009
According to a document management survey British office workers print out a mountain of paper which measures over eight miles high every year!
This is a total of around 120 billion pieces of paper with the average office worker printing out around 22 sheets every working day.
Most of this was actually unnecessary with more than half of the workers questioned in a computers survey admitting printing the same document several times by mistake.
Two in five workers (43%) said they had picked up someone else's print-out by mistake and 8 per cent admitted to printing emails without thinking before they had actually read them.
The survey discovered there was a lot of careless printing habits in British offices where less than half of workers said they were careful about printing documents and usually avoided printing hard copies unless it was absolutely necessary.
Almost a quarter (23%) of office workers admitted they did not give much thought to printing off documents and a further 13% did not worry about how many documents they sent to the printer as long as they could recycle them afterwards.
The printing waste wasn't only the fault of the workers, according to the survey, which questioned more than 2,000 workers. Two-thirds (64%) of office workers said their companies had no printing policy in place on what documents should be printed or not. One in three workers said they would change their habits if there was a policy in place.
Only 16% of workers said their company emails carried a footnote asking whether it was necessary to print. An environmentally aware message was much less common than legal disclaimers, which were included on almost half (48%) of company emails. Almost 25% of workers said they had walked away from an out-of-order printer hoping that somebody else would fix it.
The managing director of Fujitsu Siemens Computers IT Product Services, Paul Parrish, stated: "Sadly the paperless office remains a myth for many. Office printing continues to be out of control with very few companies having any realisation of their print costs.
He said that although printing and copying could amount to as much as five per cent of a company's total revenue, the majority of companies didn't have any idea how much their printing was costing them.
Despite the growing need to recycle 17 per cent of office workers admitted they just threw all waste, including paper, into their waste basket.
To make a start towards a vastly paper-reduced office and save costs on printing and paper it makes good sense to invest into a good document management system to streamline business processes and clean up the office.
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