Sustainable and Eco-friendly Print

In a world where environmental concerns have taken center stage, industries across the globe are recognizing the urgent need for sustainable practices. The demand for printed materials continues to thrive even in our increasingly digitalized society. At the same time, the imperative to reduce waste, minimize carbon footprint, and adopt sustainable alternatives has never been more critical.

All in all, the printing industry is undergoing a transformative shift towards eco-consciousness. And you may ask… why exactly?

🌎 Social responsibility

The shared goal is to minimize our carbon footprint and overall environmental impact. This can be achieved through the use of sustainable paper options, reducing waste, and recycling whenever possible.

💰 Reduced costs

Sustainability helps to save money. While the initial steps may require some time and money investments, it’s all worth it in the long term. Print sustainability is all about receding energy and resources spent on print – and do you know what you spend the most money on? Yes, energy and resources.

What is sustainable print?

At this point, it should be clear why eco-friendly print is the way to go. Now, let’s look at how to start.

These are the main goals that organizations aspiring to reduce their environmental impact should focus on:

Reducing paper consumption

Print and paper consumption have long been associated with environmental impacts, including deforestation, energy consumption, and waste generation.

By adopting conscious practices, we can actively contribute to saving paper and preventing unnecessary waste. Simple measures like printing double-sided, using recycled paper, and promoting digital alternatives can help minimize our ecological footprint.

Reducing energy consumption

Energy consumption is a good metric. If your devices are being periodically overused, it naturally leads to high energy consumption.

On top of that, such devices are prone to technical problems, and that results in frequent need for service and repairs.

This metric is not affected only by printing, other operations render high energy consumption, for example, scanning.

Reducing toner consumption

By adopting sustainable toner consumption and waste management practices, we can significantly contribute to a cleaner, healthier environment.

Properly recycling and disposing of used toner cartridges is essential to prevent them from ending up in landfills and causing harm to the environment.

Evaluating & optimizing

The term "sustainable print" suggests that it involves more than just one-time actions. In reality, it's a long-term, maintainable, and responsive approach.

It's important to periodically review the goals and outcomes and respond.

The best way is to make it a habit. Include data related to sustainability in your monthly, quarterly, or annual reporting.

How MyQ X contributes to eco-friendly print

Incorporating a print management solution is a positive step in achieving sustainable print goals. This solution can aid the planning phase and support progress toward the desired outcomes.

Learn how MyQ X can help you integrate sustainability in your print:

Easily monitor & collect data
Implement eco-friendly policies
Enable Hold and Pull print
Let users preview documents before print
Boost eco-friendly behavior with accounting
Encourage users with real-time tips for their print

Easily monitor & collect data

Before applying any new changes toward sustainable print, it is important to get a picture of how print is used in your organization.

Without knowing your environment and your users' habits, you would have to just eyeball where your organization leaves the most significant impact. And that may end up with your actions being inefficient as your users could be affected in ways that prevent them from doing their day-to-day work and accomplishing their goals.

How MyQ X solves this challenge

Administrators can prepare reports that will reveal valuable data about users' habits related to printing and scanning, show the most used printers, and also metrics that matter when it comes to environmental goals – CO2 and energy consumption.

Usage per users, printers, and more

Standard reports

Display all kinds of data per user groups (that in most organizations reflect departments), individual users, printers, or, for example, projects, and cost centers.

This way you can compare statistics across your organization and determine where you could try to conduct actions to reduce print.

Users also have a few personal reports available in the Web User Interface so that they can get their own summary.

Example of the report showing the most used printers (Top N); in this example, the number of top printers was set to 5 and pricelists are not used in this environment

Every department in your organization might have different needs when it comes to print. Including data not only per individual user or department, but also per project or cost centers, could give you a better idea about where print is required and where it could be reduced.

With a focus on the environment

Environmental Impact widget

On the MyQ Web Interface, administrators can see the summary of CO2, energy, and conversion to the number of trees that were consumed by print in their organization.

Environmental reports

Aim to demonstrate data in environmental metrics – CO2, energy consumption, and trees consumed.

These metrics are proven to be easily comparable and can help to identify problematic areas.

Example of the Environmental Report for printers; only two printers the administrator wanted to compare were filtered in this report

Toner consumption

Example of the Toner replacement report
In this case, the device had all toners replaced at the same time for the first time; as it is a new device, dates and times of installation of these currently replaced toners are unknown

Monitor toner replacements

In order to have full control over toners in your organization, you can regularly run reports checking when toners were replaced.

This way, you can identify devices that require toner to be changed often.

Implement eco-friendly policies

You have defined goals and now, with reports, you also have the data needed to decide where to start.

Now, how to do all this? First, you might want to take a look at general settings and policies you can apply across individuals and devices in your environment.

This way, it is possible to decrease paper and toner waste in quite an efficient way.

How MyQ X solves this challenge

With MyQ X, you can implement policies that will restrict print to Duplex-only, prohibit color print, and make sure Eco print mode is used. And what’s important – you can target where these rules apply.

Fine policies settings

Granular policies settings allow administrators to achieve different experiences for different users or devices. It allows you to streamline print workflows and react when you see that valuable resources might be wasted.

In MyQ X, you can define two types of policies:

Queue policies are applied on every job that is received in this queue. Simple as that. You can granularly change some of them with follow-up user and printer policies or keep these for all print.
User policies allow adapting the print release options according to particular users or user groups. On top of that, you can set permissions per device or device group as well.

Useful print policies to enhance sustainability

These policies you will be interested in most:

CHANGE COLOR – determines whether users can print color jobs

CHANGE DUPLEX – determines whether users can print in simplex (one-sided)

CHANGE TONER SAVING – determines whether users will be able to print with/without Eco mode (toner saving functionality of that particular device)

By the way, your users will always know how the job will be eventually printed because the final release options displayed on the Embedded Terminal will reflect all applied policies up to this point.

Facilitate Duplex (double-sided print)

When it comes to cutting off paper waste, there is no option more useful than Duplex print. However, it always needs tuning as not all print can be executed in duplex.

In every organization, some materials have to be printed one-sided because it is required for their further processing, they have a standardized form, or they are attached to surfaces.

MyQ X solves this by offering granular policy settings that can be tailored per department, device, or single individual.

Example: Duplex as default with the exclusion of one department

When your organization prints internal office documents, it is perfectly fine to enforce Duplex print as these do not have to have any particular form.

However, your mail room staff needs to print one-sided postal receipts.

Create direct or Pull Print queues with the policies set to Duplex long edge for your organization
Set a user policy for your entire organization to disable changing the Duplex parameter
Configure a user policy with all your mail room staff where you set the Job Defaults to Simplex and in Permissions, allow them to change it to Duplex when needed

Enable Hold and Pull Print

Direct print leads to the documents being printed immediately after they are sent by the user. While this brings some benefits, the biggest downside is that there is no way to interfere and review that the document is configured correctly once it leaves the user’s computer.

How MyQ X solves this challenge

Printing to Pull Print queues solves this. Documents sent to such queues are stopped and wait for the users to authenticate on the device to release them. That means, users can go to the My jobs screen and…

Check the document settings, e.g. whether the document was sent as Duplex
If not, they can change release options manually, and only after that release the document
If they are unsure if this is even the correct document, they can display the Job preview

Read more: Secure Hold and Pull Print

Let users preview documents before print

In combination with the Pull Print queues, this ensures that only the correct documents are actually requested to be printed.

How MyQ X solves this challenge

There are three ways users can preview print jobs with MyQ

Preview on the Embedded Terminals

This is a perfect time to preview the document – when you are at the device, preparing to print it.

Make sure this is the correct file you want to release.
You can zoom in to see exactly what is in the document
If it is not what you expected, easily delete the file right from the device screen

Preview on the MyQ Web User Interface

Your users can access the preview of their waiting documents from the MyQ Web User Interface.

Comes in handy if your environment does not yet have all Embedded Terminals supporting Job preview.

Job Preview on the MyQ X Mobile Client app

Preview in MyQ X Mobile Client

In MyQ X Mobile Client, you can also easily display the preview of your waiting jobs.

Your users can quickly pull up their phone and review the file there.

What’s even better – they can also request its print right from the app.

Comes in handy if your environment does not yet have all Embedded Terminals supporting Job preview.

Boost eco-friendly behavior with accounting

You, as an administrator, most likely have a good overview of print in your organization (especially if you’ve already looked at MyQ reports mentioned above). Now it’s time to put this knowledge to use and shape up your print environment.

Set up quotas to control spending

People have tried, but no one has figured out a better way to take control over excessive print other than setting up quota limits.

If you want to make sure that print in your environment does not exceed certain thresholds, quotas are for you.

What can you monitor? Both print and scan.

How can you monitor it?

Page-based quota monitors – you probably can tell – the number of printer pages
Cost-based quota monitors the cost of print which is calculated based on price lists you can assign to individual devices or groups of devices

And who can you monitor?

With these quotas, you can configure limits per user, members of a group (where each member has their own limit), or collective (shared) quotas per accounting group or cost center.

Quota displayed on the Canon Embedded Terminal 8.2

You users will be able to check the status of their printing and scanning volume on the Embedded Terminals, Desktop Client, Mobile Client, and Web User Interface.

Encourage users with real-time tips for their print

You have a complex print environment with MyQ X supporting your environmental goals through all the steps we’ve described above. Where to go from here?

What if we told you that you can influence your users’ decisions with real-time useful tips on how to print?

How MyQ X solves this challenge

Propose changes with interactive notifications

A User Interaction Script applied on a print queue allows you to program an interaction with the job owner and modify the job based on the user's response.

Can you see how powerful this could be?

Examples: Promote responsible print

If a job has more than 10 pages, ask the user if they want to print it double-sided
If a job is in color, ask the user whether they want to consider printing it in monochrome
…or ask them to enable Eco mode (toner saving)
You can redirect the job to a queue with a printer that is more resource-efficient and inform the user where the job was sent
Send the job to a tandem queue and have it released on the least used printer

User interaction example in MyQ Desktop Client

Scripting can also be used to directly enforce release options on a job, based on its properties without the user interaction part. Read more in the Job Scripting documentation.