OVERVIEW

Project abstract: The Generator working group Closing the Loop and former student group Share a Vital Earth worked together with IS&T to implement a number of projects to raise awareness about how to save paper while printing in the Athena clusters. Printing is one of the main reasons students use Athena, but the printing system is not always intuitive and many people print single sided with a header page for each job simply because they do not know there is an alternative or how to use it. Over the course of 2007-2008, "Print Smarter" signs were put up in all campus Athena clusters and a new website was launched at web.mit.edu/printing. During the summer of 2008, IS&T changed the default print setting to double sided for all new accounts (header pages are still the default).

Contact: closingtheloop@mit.edu

Website: http://sustainability.mit.edu/Closing_the_Loop & http://web.mit.edu/printing

Current status: Closing the loop is not currently focusing on Athena printing as a priority. However, there is another student group called Paper Saving (papersaving@mit.edu) that is taking up the work.

DETAILS

Funding sources:

• Trial implementation of Print Smarter Signs (W20 and 12 clusters) printing and laminating signs: IS&T
• Full implementation of Print Smarter Signs: MITei campus energy grant through Closing the Loop

Data sources:

• Querying the print queues gives access to # of print jobs on each printer, number of pages in the job (double sided and single sided are counted the same), and whether or not each job had a header page. This query system was set up by Eric Price (ecprice@mit.edu)
• Student web-survey about printing habits
• In-person survey regarding the effectiveness of the Print Smarter signs, December 2007 (survey pdf) (results pdf)

Documentation:

• Print Smarter Poster (pdf)
• Analysis of trends in header page use (xls)
• Presentation to MITei Campus Energy Taskforce Behavior Change Subgroup, December 2007 (ppt)
• Half-page insert for UA Sustainability Booklet, fall 2007 (pdf)

Recommendations for future work:

• Work toward changing the default header-page setting
• Spread the word about how to change your default print setting to double-sided and no headerpage by using the following command at the athena prompt: echo setenv LPROPT -hZduplex >> ~/.environment

IMPACT

Number of students involved:

• Spring 2007: 7
• Fall 2007: 5
• Spring 2008: 5
• Summer 2008: 4
• Fall 2008: 2

Campus footprint:

• Header page use has declined from around 46% of jobs in November of 2006 to 42% in May 2008
• With 1.5 million jobs printed a year, this represents 60,000 pages not printed
• With an embodied energy of 55.7 Watt-hours per page (printgreener.com), this represents 3,342 kWh of embodied energy saved
• The switch to double-sided default for new users is also expected to have reduced paper use, although no data is available to quantify this effect

Other impact:

• The default for new Athena users (who sign up for accounts after the summer of 2008) has been changed to double sided printing.

LESSONS FOR FUTURE PROJECTS

Organizational Lessons:

• IS&T is very willing to work with students if you are flexible and persistent

Technical Lessons:

• Getting a good graphic designer is essential. Here was our original design (jpg), with the same content as the final version (pdf). You can see how much the re-design helped make it more readable and accessible.
• We have not been able to track double-sided vs. single-sided because the print server does not record this data