Walton College Information Systems Department Tackles Print Waste

The department of information systems, in partnership with the Technology Center at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, has taken the university’s sustainability initiatives to heart and tackled wasteful printing practices. With the strong support of Moez Limayem, department chair and holder of the Walton Professorship in Information Systems, the staff began with the simple, but effective method of setting all printers in the department to default to duplex, effectively cutting paper usage in half.

The next step involved reducing the massive amount of paper contained in various filing cabinets, folders, and desks. By scanning and storing soft copies of the various documents and forms, they were able to reclaim valuable office space and increase efficiency since documents became only a click away instead of in a file cabinet or on someone’s desk.

At the moment, the staff has just finished piloting Xerox’s Secure Print that allows for secure printing by requiring a code to be entered at the printer before the document will actually print. The benefits of this have been twofold. First, faculty and staff need no longer worry about tests or confidential material lying around on the printer. And second, the extremely wasteful practice of “printing and forgetting” has been completely eliminated as print jobs that aren’t released within one day are simply deleted without being printed. Both faculty and staff in the department have really embraced the change.

“It is amazing how much paper I have been able to reduce because I am able to get a second chance on being ‘print’ clicking happy. It also makes me stop and think if I really need to print out documents,” said Susan Bristow, information systems instructor.

Jeff Mullins, executive-in-residence, added, “Even though a step was added to the process of printing, the disruption was minimal, and we have seen several benefits —visibility into how much we are actually printing, the ability to cancel unneeded jobs, and the ability to release your print jobs all at the same time without them getting intermingled with everyone else’s. Also, increased awareness of our printing habits has encouraged me to start delivering more content and assessments exclusively online.”

In the past year, these simple practices have saved the department a total of 40 cases of paper (200,000 pages), reduced toner, eliminated unneeded printers, and have ultimately saved the university approximately $1,240 in paper and $1,947 in toner alone. This savings also translates into one ton of wood (about 10 trees), 12 million BTUs of energy, 2,353 pounds CO2 equivalent gases, 8,888 gallons of water, and 763 pounds of solid waste.

Imagine what could be accomplished if departments across campus adopted similar measures.

For more information about how your department can implement similar measures, contact Suson Wheeler at swheeler@walton.uark.edu or Will Allred at wallred@walton.uark.edu.