“It increases the ‘reduce waste’ message,” said Deb Koehler, director of sustainability of the Xerox Office Group.
Koehler said that Xerox had been patient with the 28-person start-up. Despite the initial sluggishness of the software, “we also had a lot of feedback that if someone really cares about reducing the waste, it’s worth the wait.”
It may be worth the money, too. GreenPrint says its software, which costs about US$70 per corporate user, will shave an average of 17 percent from the cost of paper and ink — about US$100 annually for a typical employee printing 10,000 pages at US$0.06 a page. In the case of Savills, a British real estate brokerage firm whose agents briefly tested the software, the projected savings were more than US$800 per user a year, GreenPrint said.
With that kind of money at stake, a successful GreenPrint could nip at the profits of the big printer makers, like Hewlett-Packard and Canon.
HP deflects talk about the cost of ink, preferring to discuss carbon footprints. The company has directed its conservation efforts toward cutting the energy used by its printers, recycling ink and toner cartridges and making it easier for machines to print on both sides of a sheet.
HP, the leading maker of printers, makes a 40 percent operating profit on ink, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. As a result, HP is trying to bolster, not reduce, consumption of printer ink, which costs customers US$40 to US$80 for about 30 mililiters (making Dom Perignon champagne look cheap at about US$5 for the same amount).
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