Guest post by Jordan Darragh, CEO, PrintReleaf @printreleaf
As individual consumers on the planet, our everyday buying decisions impact the natural environment. Those same everyday buying decisions have an exponential impact on the natural environment when they are made by large enterprise organizations. Both mid-sized and large organizations must decide how to best manage their massive energy use, waste, and paper consumption.
In the last decade, we’ve experienced a significant spike in renewable energy investment and infrastructure across building and transportation sectors. Innovative solutions across the spectrum of products and services help enterprises make the right choices to reduce environmental impact. We’ve seen increased focus on reducing waste and incorporating reusable or compostable materials across all kinds of products, for example, plant-based plastic cups. The same is true for forest-based products, including paper.
How Digital Transformation Impacts Sustainability
A rise in digital transformation, i.e. migrating paper processes to digital workflows, has reduced the enterprise paper footprint. At the same time, despite progress in digital transformation, for most large organizations, a significant volume of printing and corresponding paper consumption remains. Within that scope, the same organizations are left deciding how to best ensure their print solution and paper consumption are sustainably managed.
Thus far, options for sustainable print and paper management have focused on recycled paper or paper sourced through a certified “Chain of Custody” (CoC). Both options promise environmental benefits, yet present challenges. The granular fiber in recycled paper affects the image quality, and the cost of CoC sourcing can come at a premium versus virgin generic non-certified paper. However, a new solution has emerged called PrintReleaf.
Now organizations can easily strengthen their commitment to the environment through a more sustainable MPS program with a subscription to reforestation services, which is simple, automatic and verified.
How to Solve Sustainable Paper Sourcing and Accountability
The PrintReleaf software platform and certification system measures paper consumption, equates it to forest impact, and automates equivalent certified reforestation back into the natural environment. Trees are planted in geographic areas of need around the world. As they grow, trees are independently verified for survival. As a result, when an organization subscribes to PrintReleaf, rather than just reseeding a tree plantation, they’re helping sustain and grow our global forestry system — one print job at a time.
Xerox has long been a leader in sustainability and continuously finds ways to innovate and drive results. They “walk the talk” in everyday business practices, products and solutions, and they’ve taken another step forward by subscribing to PrintReleaf for their own internal print environments. This creates exponentially positive impact by making PrintReleaf globally available to customers as part of the Xerox Managed Print Services (MPS) offering. PrintReleaf can be applied independent of or in combination with recycled paper or CoC options.
So next time a participating organization prints, they can also plant a tree…at a reforestation project in South Dakota, in Northern Ireland, in Brazil, or any one of PrintReleaf’s global forestry projects around the world. This positively impacts not only their bottom line, but the world we all live in.
