ITC reduces paper waste
By Julie Hofler
Cavalier Daily Associate Editor
Each month 85 trees are cut down to provide paper for University students who wish to print out assignments in the 19 Information and Technology Communication computer labs. With one tree producing 11,765 sheets of paper, one million sheets are used by the labs monthly, many of which are wasted on unnecessarily repeated print jobs by impatient or frustrated students.
Each day the stacks of wasted paper pile up around the Clemons Library and Cocke Hall printers, and crowds of students gather to search frantically for their print jobs. Something had to be done.
"People have to be aware of how much paper is used," said Mary Hanna, manager of ITC student labs.
Enter ITC's Printing Awareness Project: Print Once. The project and ITC's Printing Awareness Week kicked off Monday with the addition of a tree icon to the desktops of all ITC lab computers. A simple double- click on the tree will tell students the position of their print job on the printer's queue.
"Over the last two years slow printing has been a legitimate complaint," said Marty Peterman, an information technology specialist for ITC.
"There's also the occasional complaint from a student from an environmental point of view," he added.
The Print Once project started though the work of ITC's five student lab managers, Sharon Kim, Travis Lynch, Ricky Moore, Howard Anderson and Chris Spiller, who proposed the idea to Hanna and Peterman. Although crowded printing and wasted paper has been a problem in computer labs for several years, Hanna said it was only within the past year that ITC obtained the technology to make the tree icon feature possible.
"We're all really excited about it," said Hanna, adding that the feedback in the computer labs has been positive so far.
In addition to the desktop reminder, students in ITC labs will hear an announcement every hour informing them of the new feature and encouraging them to participate in the conservation effort.
Besides environmental concerns, the wasted paper is also a cost issue. Hanna said all students pay a technology fee for the upkeep of the computer labs, so it is in everyone's interest to keep the cost of paper low.
Each week, ITC will post the weekly amounts of paper used at each lab on the Print Once Web site at www.itc.virginia.edu/printonce to keep track of the project's progress.
But it doesn't stop there. Hanna said ITC also will try out duplex printing - or double-sided printing - in Cocke Hall and other labs in an effort to save paper.
"There really aren't that many sheets of paper that come out of a tree," Hanna said.
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