The University has a corporate environmental policy that set the environmental agenda for the organisation and provide a framework that we need to work within. The over all aim of the policy is to reduce our carbon emissions and to reduce the negative environmental impact of our activities. We have specific objectives to reduce our energy consumption, to procure environmentally preferable products and services – and for procurement to develop a environmentally preferable procurement policy. We also have an objective to reduce the tonnage of waste that we generate and increase the percentage of waste that we reuse and recycle. How do these tie in with our printing activities...well our printing activities have a significant environmental impact....
For the Environmental Print Review (the first project group that was set up) I did an environmental impact assessment of our printing activities....we found that our printing activities has a significant impact on the environment as this slide shows. Of those environmental impacts the use of printers and photocopiers has a biggest environmental impact than paper use.
Communication is key to the success of any project and this is no different. We plan to have some posters designed to help with our awareness raising, we also plan to produce guide to best practice printing - the two will complement each other. We don’t envisage carrying out a print audit in every department, and the audit tool kit has been designed so that anyone can pick it up and carry out an audit. The took kit will be developed as an online tool that all members of staff can access. We thought would run workshops – for two reasons really. Firstly to promote the tool kit to department and get people all enthused. Secondly to give people a bit of training to build confidence before staff went off and completed an audit in their department. To monitor our performance we have set ourselves a series of performance indicators – we have one KPI (sheets of A4 per employee) and five PI’s, all of which will contribute to our corporate objectives.