Xerox develops Sustainability Calculator for doc tech

Part of the company’s Xerox Office Services, the Sustainability Calculator measures the waste and greenhouse gas emissions associated with powering printers, copiers, fax machines, and multifunction devices. It also measures the differences, in environmental terms, resulting from practices such as printing single-sided documents instead of double-sided, or using different types of ink.

In addition to the aforementioned version, which Xerox reps would use during an assessment for a customer, the company also has developed a slimmed-down Web-based version.

Both calculators require a user to input information about the various machines in his or her organization. They then employ “proprietary algorithms and document assessment research to deliver data about a company’s entire fleet of office products, from printers to multifunction devices and copiers, regardless of the equipment supplier,” according to Xerox.

Once a customer has a glimpse of the inefficiency of its document-tech systems, the next step (Xerox hopes) is to show customers how to gain efficiency by, say, in retiring various older copiers, fax machines, and printers for fewer, newer MFDs.

It might be tempting for to dismiss this type of tool as simply a marketing scheme to exploit CXOs who’ve caught a case of the green fever that’s swept the U.S. and beyond. But the reality is, there are cost savings to be had from certain sustainable practices, and making adjustments to your company’s network of printers and other document-technology products is one of them. That includes moving to fewer multi-purpose machines as your older ones are ready for retirement.

First, a new model MFD should be Energy Star compliant, which means it has a significantly lower power draw — as much as 70 percent, according to Xerox — than that of its one-function predecessors combined. Also, from a green perspective, manufacturing and shipping four machines — a copier, a scanner, a fax machines, and a printer — requires more resources than does building and shipping a single MFD that can do the work of four.

According to Patricia Calkins, vice president of environment, health, and safety at Xerox, many customers have been asking for more information about the green benefits of consolidating doc-tech systems and improv-ing their printing practices. “I was very surprised as I’ve been doing customer roundtables,” says Calkins. “We talk about optimizing the office, and people have said, ‘We understand the financial benefits. We want to talk about the environmental benefits.”

Global defense and technology company Northrop Grumman worked with Xerox at one of its sectors to reduce a fleet of 2,000 printers, hundreds of MFDs, and stand-alone copiers to fewer than 1,100 devices. According to the Sustainability Calculator numbers, the change resulted in a savings of 27 percent in energy usage while reducing GHG emissions by 26 percent and solid waste creation by 33 percent.