Environmental Impact

One of the primary aims of PaperCut is to reduce printing levels by changing a user's printing behavior. Implementing monitoring, quotas and charging are a good way of drawing a user's attention to their habits. The topic of the environment, global warming, and waste management is currently an area of debate and interest to many. Highlighting the environmental aspects of their activities is another good way to modify a user's behavior.

Environmental impact is expressed as three statistics:

• Trees, or the number of trees that were expended to make the paper.
• Carbon, or the CO₂ equivalent in greenhouse gases released during the paper production.
• Energy, or the energy used by the manufacturing process when producing the paper. This is expressed as the equivalent amount of time required to run a 60W incandescent light bulb, so as to be easier to understand.

For more information about how the environmental impact statistics are calculated see the Environmental Impact section of the user manual. If you have a few moments now, try out our ROI Calculator and find out what level of impact implementing PaperCut in your organization could have on the environment. Environmental impact counters are shown to users when logging into the user web interface. Administrators can also view the impact of users or printers via the details pages in the admin interface. The environmental impact counters may also be displayed in other locations, such as the sidebar in Windows Vista, or on an intranet page using the web widgets.