Posted on February 24th, 2009 by Barry Collins

5% of printed documents never collected

I heard this thoroughly depressing stat at a HP briefing this morning: one in 20 office printouts are simply left in the printer’s output tray, never to be seen by the eyes of the thoughtless drone who pressed Ctrl + P in the first place.

I’m not a tree-hugging, environmental doom monger, but even my green-weary soul was alarmed at the amount of wasted paper, ink and energy such needless printing consumes. Let alone the money.

HP has a solution to curb the printer fly-tippers called Pool Printing, which ensures the document doesn’t actually print until the person physically goes to the machine to collect it. They have to swipe a card or punch in a pin number before the printer spews out the goods.

That might well reduce the wastage, but the problem is it also punishes the conscientious workers too. If I could reclaim the amount of time I’ve spent standing by our office laserjet, waiting for the thing to warm up before my document came sliding out of the roller, I’d be 21 again. Putting another delay into the process would drive me up the wall.

However, I’d argue the biggest problem isn’t necessarily the 5% of orphan documents, but the other 95% that are usually only printed on one side and come with needless wasted pages at the end. The vast majority of my printouts are web pages. Nine times out of ten, the text I want to read is on the first sheet. What follows on the second is a blank centre column, with the website’s navigation running down the left and banner ads running down the right. That’s 50% of the printout going straight into the recycling bin.

Now, I know Firefox has a Shrink to Fit option (in the File | Print Preview menu) that can solve this problem, but this makes the print so tiny that I’d need to borrow Deidre Barlow’s specs to read it.

So here’s a challenge for Mozilla, Microsoft and the other browser makers: find a way to print only the interesting bits of web pages and make me feel a little bit better about myself.

Tags: Green, HP, Printers

Posted in: Green, Newsdesk

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12 Responses to “ 5% of printed documents never collected ”

Darien Graham-Smith Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
A pet peeve of mine is when you print out what looks like a short email, only to discover that it actually runs to eleven pages because it includes the whole conversation history… followed by multiple copies of lengthy legal disclaimers. If Outlook were able to identify and print only (say) the “top” email and one included message beneath it, it would be equivalent to planting a rainforest the size of Wales. FACT.
David Wright Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
That reminds me, just sent something out to print, as I was going out to lunch!

Seriously though, I don’t print very often, but when I do, it is usually 300+ page documents, I don’t want to have to wait for that to start printing, once I get to the printer! :-O

I would guess, people printing long documents might swipe and pin, then go away and do something else and forget about it anyway… :-S

It is a good idea, and printing out only the bits you need is another example – I also tend to print double sided, where I can.
Mark Thompson Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I also get annoyed at the inability to print in a smart way from browsers. Sometimes I end up copying and pasting the text from a web page into Word just so I don’t have to print off all the extraneous junk around the edges and at the bottom.

Darien’s point is also a good one. I had to do precisely this yesterday and I was cursing the inability to do something simple from Outlook such as only print the first page. This is a very bad omission that should have been resolved several versions ago.
DavidB Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
My HP printer’s software gives the option to print any page or pages you want in a document (including emails). Have they now changed this?

It also allows you to print only text that you’ve selected on a web page.

More use of ‘file – print’ and less of the toolbar shortcut which prints everything might let you see these options.
hjlupton Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I think more websites should over a printer friendly link, as the amount of wasted printing from websites otherwise can be more than just a little excessive. Certainly a lot of online shopping websites that i have used offer this option, so it can’t be impossible to implement.

on a different note, the amount of paper waste that goes on in some of the offices around the building i work is frankly scary, i’ve seen the same printed out slide decks etc sitting in the printer tray for 3 days at a time.

I like the fact HP have given the issue some thought, but coming up with an ideal solution isn’t going to be as easy as using a swipe card, as once the person has swiped, there’s nothing stopping them from walking away and forgetting about their print out. maybe as an extension to the idea, you could have it so a print job can’t print until the previous one is removed from the printer tray. if a recycle bin is near the printer at least the paper wouldn’t totallygo to waste, but then even this idea doesn’t stop some impatient numpty coming up to the printer and throwing away someone else’s print out that may have only finished a few seconds before….
Andrew Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
We have a similar system to this on our Canon printers.
It can be a bit annoying at times, but generally feedback has been positive and it has certainly cut down on the amount of documents left around the printers.
it also means that if one printer is busy the user can just go to another printer and swipe in there to print there document.
Daniel Titley Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Try http://www.printwhatyoulike.com, it’s a bit fiddly but works fine.
cerebros Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Well in my workplace we have two main causes of this.

Firstly, the office-bound staff are working off thin-clients on Citrix. Since we moved in a year ago all the terminals default to a printer on the higher of the two floors we have. Our outsourced IT support still haven’t fixed it so you can imagine the fun that results from having to remember to reset your default printer every morning.

Secondly, those staff who are home based also have to remember to select their local printer as the laptops seem to default to the office based printers when they’re connected to the office network via broadband
Alex Pepper Says:
February 25th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Does no-one else use the “Print Selection” option?
pcernie Says:
February 25th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
‘So here’s a challenge for Mozilla, Microsoft and the other browser makers: find a way to print only the interesting bits of web pages’

You should probably suggest that ‘officially’, Barry, that could be quite a useful feature!
Mike Robins Says:
February 26th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Try the easy way

For text Mark the text (Ctrl.C) >word processor>(Ctrl.V)> Format as you want.

For Pictures/Graphics/websites/ text (that can`t be copied as text) > print button(on keyboard) >use preferred graphic software> Paste> do what you want.

This saves paper and ink and takes less time then waiting for all those unwanted pages.
Ben Says:
February 27th, 2009 at 10:30 am
To be honest at our place we only find out what’s going on by reading documents left on the printer for weeks by the idiots that rule us!