The following appears on techrepublic.com
It’s counterintuitive, but Lexmark wants to save trees and reduce the overall carbon footprint of the printing business–and they’re putting their money where their mouth is.
Think about how many times you’ve started printing a document and realized there was a mistake. You try to cancel it, but pages are already spewing out the printer. Or another common situation: you don’t want all those excess pages with photos, ads, and hyperlinks. You leave it in the printer bed. On a good day, someone puts the paper in the recycling bin. The majority of the time, however, the pages are tossed in the trash, only to pile up in a landfill unnecessarily.
One in six pages of printed paper is never picked up, and in the entire lifetime of a printer, up to 80 percent of the machine’s carbon impact comes from the amount of pages printed.
Several years ago, Lexmark saw this enormous discrepancy in the printing industry, and decided to act on it. Customers were getting a lot more conscious about how much they were printing, while Lexmark and other printer companies focused all their marketing around helping businesses print more.
“We had this discussion of keeping on path we are going, which is encouraging people to print more, or get on a different side of the table and get them to print less,” said CEO Paul Rooke. “Our DNA is customers for life, so we thought we should turn this headwind into a tailwind.”
After that, they created a campaign and sustainability model around a simple slogan: “Print less, save more.”
Creating a legacy of sustainability
In Lexington, Kentucky, surrounded by miles of thoroughbred farms on the outskirts of coal country is the Lexmark headquarters. Owned by IBM for many years, Lexmark was once a manufacturing giant for typewriters before they got into the printing business, so the inside is a typical old-school industrial space—large, protruding pipes and wide, cold hallways.
But the company’s progressive efforts in sustainability are immediately noticeable. There are recycling receptacles in almost every room, ample outdoor green space, shared equipment and resources, and lights that can be turned off remotely when not in use.
Click here to read the rest of the article on techrepublic.com
