SWC is taking practical steps to reduce paper use across the College aiming to reduce unnecessary printing, saving resources and lowering costs.

SWC is taking practical steps to reduce paper use across the College, aiming to reduce unnecessary printing, save resources and lower costs. It starts with a simple question before we press print:

Do I really need this on paper?

Paper can feel like a small, everyday resource, but the scale of printing in organisations quickly adds up. Across the UK Government, paper purchasing has fallen by 66% since its 2017–18 baseline. That reduction represents around 407,000 trees’ worth of paper, demonstrating what is possible when organisations combine digital processes with changes in everyday behaviour.

There are lessons from colleges and public bodies around the world about the tools that help reduce printing and copying.

At Stockholm University, Sweden, researchers tested two approaches to reducing paper use. The first was familiar: send staff messages encouraging them to print less and use double-sided printing. The second was much simpler change the printer's default setting from single-sided to double-sided.

The result was striking. The messages alone had no measurable effect, while changing the default reduced paper consumption by 15%. The effect was immediate and was still evident more than six months later.

This is an important lesson. Design systems that make the better choice easier.

Can indifference make the world greener?

A similar approach was tested among US federal employees.

The intervention was carried out by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Economic Research Service (ERS), in collaboration with the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team.

Researchers tested whether a very small change to the printing process could encourage people to print double-sided.

When an employee tried to print a single-sided document, a pop-up appeared asking them to change their printer default to double-sided. They could still proceed with single-sided printing, but doing so required an additional click.

The trial was randomised at the printer level, allowing researchers to compare employees who received the prompt with those who did not. The prompt increased double-sided printing by 5.8 percentage points — from 46% to almost 52%.

Increasing duplex printing among the federal workforce

What works? Learning from elsewhere

Colleges are continuing to experiment with a similar approach to the one adopted in SWC. Maynooth introduced compulsory double-sided printing and automatic deletion of print jobs that had not been collected within 48 hours, reporting that, within six months, the initiative had saved the equivalent of 14 trees.

The HM Land Registry reported a 67% reduction in A4-equivalent paper use against its 2017–18 baseline, attributing the reduction to its digital services programme and a move towards on-request printing; producing paper copies when they are required or requested rather than routinely printing documents.

Taken together, these examples point to a consistent lesson:

Defaults matter. Convenience matters. The design of the system matters.

Double-sided printing can become automatic; uncollected print jobs can disappear rather than becoming waste; secure release can prevent documents being forgotten at a printer; and digital-first processes can make paper the exception rather than the norm.

Many thanks for all the efforts made over the last 12 months to reduce printing and copying across our campuses.