Case Study: Printing Green While Saving Green

One telecommunications company improves its sustainability and print security

About the customer

The customer is a telecommunications service provider serving residential and business customers across the United States.

Teaming up with Ricoh on environmental initiatives has proven to be a win-win for the telecommunications company — and for the environment.

Challenge

Solution

After analyzing the company’s print environment, we discovered a number of ways to not only reduce waste, but costs, too.

Solutions included:

  • Setting printers to primarily duplex output.

  • Defaulting to black-and-white printing.

  • Requiring users to enter in a code to print documents.

  • Eliminating separator pages.

The company also began participating in our toner recycling program, which allowed it to ship spent cartridges to our recycling partners for free.

Result

To date, the implemented initiatives had a considerable environmental impact*, as the organization:

  • Reduced paper consumption by 111,904,878 sheets**.

  • Recycled 22,216 toner cartridges, which they estimate saves 75,534 pounds of plastic and metal from the landfill.

The company has also seen a considerable financial impact as well. By using less paper, they saved over $600,000. On top of that, defaulting printers to black-and-white output saved another $700,000.

* Data was provided to Ricoh by the company’s accounting department. Ricoh has not validated these results or claims of the customer. These results were specific to this customer and individual results may vary. Ricoh cannot guarantee that other customers will achieve similar results.

** Data calculated using Ricoh’s TCO FullView.

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