November 4, 2019
Despite what you may have heard, in the business world, sustainability pays.
A Harvard study showed that high-sustainability companies achieved an annual average return that was 4.8% higher than low-sustainability companies over an 18-year period starting in the early 90s.
Still, putting sustainability into action isn’t easy. You’ve got to win buy-in from execs and drive organizational change to make any kind of significant impact. So to be successful, you must carefully choose when and how you implement sustainability initiatives.
That’s where managed print services (MPS) comes in. To make a meaningful, lasting impact on sustainability, without the struggle, MPS is a no-brainer.
In the United States, businesses produce 12.1 trillion sheets of paper per year which take about 1.4 billion trees to produce. Considering that mature trees absorb about 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, that means those 12.1 trillion sheets of paper cost the planet about 69 billion pounds of carbon dioxide each year. With all these negative impacts on the environment, few sustainability programs focus on replacing the paper used in business today. That needs to change…
Despite this, the average American office isn’t very efficient about its paper use. The average office makes 19 copies of every document and they lose one out of every 20 sheets of paper.
MPS can (and will) stop this madness.
Even better, if you partner with a company like ARC, you could enroll in our Print & Plant Program, which is a program designed to plant a tree (or more depending on what you sign up for) every time your company uses a tree’s worth of paper. It’s a simple program with a big impact, which you learn more about on this page.
According to the University of Colorado, one of the biggest obstacles for sustainability initiatives is not just making the business case to execs but also developing metrics to assess the initiative’s success.
With MPS, print activity tracking technology enables you to monitor your sustainability goals and initiatives. With this in place, it becomes exceedingly simple to deliver progress reports to execs and show evidence of the effects of your sustainability efforts.
Plus, with an MPS provider like ARC, you’ll get insightful dashboards that’ll help you identify even more opportunities to achieve greater advances in your sustainability initiatives.
It’s not enough to convince executives that your initiative has a legitimate business case… you also have to execute your plan. To do that, it takes buy-in from colleagues within and outside your department. After all, sustainability initiatives generally require people to change their behavior in some way.
If people don’t buy in or they don’t understand what you’re doing, their behavior won’t change. But with MPS, you’re well equipped to execute on your sustainability initiative because—with smart, automated printer rules—people will have no choice but to fall in line. Printer rules will force people to be more sustainable with their printing because these rules simply don’t allow users to do wasteful things like leave print jobs in the tray or only print on one side of the page.
Achieving lofty goals like becoming more sustainable isn’t easy—it takes planning, patience, and change management. Yet you can be up and running with MPS in a relatively short time. Even better, soon after you’re up and running, you’ll be able to easily share your progress with your team and executives. And that’ll help ensure people remain engaged with your efforts.
To learn more about how ARC uses MPS to help organizations of all sizes execute on their sustainability goals, read more about our MPS services. Then take another couple of minutes to learn about our Print and Plant Program which takes the sustainability of MPS to another level.