Sheridan consumes up to 600,000 sheets of paper weekly

by Ryan Bolton and Jon Kennedy

Sheridan’s Trafalgar students and faculty consume up to 600,000 sheets of non-recycled paper every week, far outstripping other area colleges’ weekly paper consumption, the Sheridan Sun has learned.

On average, each one of Sheridan’s 9,000 students and 326 full-time faculty at Trafalgar Campus use some 64 sheets of paper every week for assignments, handouts and research.

That’s three tons of paper or 72 trees a week, according to GreenPrint, an environmentally-friendly software company.

Students and faculty use paper at such a rate that Sheridan spends up to $120,000 on paper purchases annually.

“We spend probably $110,000 to $120,000 a year on paper… just on paper,” Jim Greer, Sheridan’s purchasing officer, told the Sheridan Sun. This figure does not include expensive toner or printer maintenance costs.

Other area colleges have policies in place to curb superfluous paper use.

Conestoga College, for example, has taken the initiative in trying to stem how much paper faculty and students consume. Students are permitted a maximum of 1,500 pages each semester. All printing must be school-related and students and faculty are instructed to duplex print – printing on both sides of a page. Moreover, each print job cannot exceed two copies and the school has the right to restrict printing if “abuse is suspected,” according to Conestoga’s website.

“There are printers in every lab but not in classrooms,” said Charlene Bailey, an IT Technician at Conestoga College, in an e-mail. “Student technicians do a printer run every morning and write down how much paper is left in the printer and how much paper they add to a room.”

Conestoga, with 6,200 full-time and 33,000 part-time students, consumes approximately 81,000 sheets of paper a week, according to Mike Abraham, the NetMail & GroupWise Administrator at Conestoga College.

George Brown College with 15,000 students, in comparison, printed 54,000 sheets last week in its Library Learning Commons’ and computer centres throughout its three campuses, said Tetsuro Saito of Educational Resources at George Brown. Moreover, George Brown charges five cents per print job and has set the printers to duplex as default.

At Humber College students receive 2,500 credits from their IT fees, which allows for 500 print jobs a semester. Once the credits are exhausted, students can purchase more credits at five cents for each duplex page. With a population of 18,500 full-time and 50,000 part-time students, Humber prints an average of 129,550 pages a week.

“Currently, all but a few printers duplex,” said Ryan Burton, Humber’s Service Support Manager, in an e-mail. “Getting the rest of those printers to duplex will cut my paper cost by an additional five per cent.”

Sheridan has the ability to duplex, but does not always set its printers to do so.

“In IT here, we are seeing 66 per cent duplexing. But in the student labs it is more like 29 per cent [duplex print jobs],” said Jim Fletcher, an IT director at Sheridan. “I would like them [students] to embrace duplex printing.”

So why does Sheridan consume so much paper in comparison to other local colleges?

Fletcher suspects it’s because of the lack of duplex printing coupled with other factors.

There are printers in virtually every classroom and lab at Sheridan making printing convenient. More importantly, printing is ostensibly free for each student, although each student pays for IT operations through ancillary fees.

“It isn’t free, but it is readily accessible… Putting an account system in place will make people account for the pages they print,” said Fletcher.

Various other colleges and universities, for instance, have implemented print cards that charge a set fee per print job. Like George Brown, the University of Waterloo, University of Western Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier University and other post-secondary institutions use print cards.

“The IT department is tracking [paper consumption] in classrooms and labs,” said Greer. The IT department has implemented a print monitoring software system called PaperCut NG. The software is capable of tracking and charging print quotas “to promote the responsible use of IT resources,” according to its website.

WebCT is another possible solution to reduce Sheridan’s vast amount of paper consumption, said Greer. By submitting and posting assignments via WebCT, both students and faculty can cut back on their paper consumption.

“We’ve seen actually a bit of a decline in paper usage over the years because of WebCT,” said Greer.

On the other hand, both Fletcher and Greer contend that students are not aware of the mass amount of paper they waste daily.

“You see printers with copy there that no one has picked up. Yeah, there is a waste,” Greer concedes.

Fletcher explained that “rogue printing” also impacts Sheridan’s paper consumption. For instance, “some web browsers will prompt you to print 1,800 sheets” instead of the required six pages.

Greer says that the software is in place to track and possibly charge for each print job. This software, he says, may change wasteful habits.

“If a student is told now with the rumour about having to pay for print, you may think twice about just printing it and leaving it,” said Greer.