Copy Paper Consumption
The University of Kansas purchases and disposes a significant amount of copy paper. Although copy paper is necessary to the daily operations of the University, the production and disposal of it is environmentally harmful. The best way to mitigate the harmful environmental effects of copy paper, and save a considerable amount of money in the process, is to reduce the consumption of it by buying and consuming less of it. Certain behaviors and barriers to changing those behaviors must first be addressed before launching a successful effort to reduce copy paper consumption at the source. This paper examines current paper usage at KU, how that paper usage can be reduced taking into account barriers that might hinder that process, and additional research suggestions.
As part of the research for this paper, two separate surveys were distributed to a random sample of faculty and staff on April 28, 2008. A random sample of 1000 faculty and graduate teaching assistants was gathered along with a sample of 1000 staff, for each survey – (It should be noted that although a random sample of 1000 was gathered for each, one staff survey and two faculty surveys did not reach their intended recipients due to email errors. The selected participants were given two weeks to complete the surveys. The staff response rate was 15%, and the faculty response rate was 34%. The results of the surveys are posted below.
The key findings for the two surveys are as follows:
Staff
- 50% of the staff print 11-50 pages during a typical workday.
- Of the amount of paper staff are printing, emails make up almost half of those print jobs.
- The overwhelming majority of staff recycle in their respective offices.
- The majority of staff do not use double-sided printing because the printers in the office are not capable of duplexing.
- The majority of faculty require their students to turn in 24 pages or more during the course of the semester.
- The majority of faculty require their students to turn in work in paper form.
- The majority of faculty prefer to make comments in the margin when grading assignments and papers.
- The majority of faculty said they would allow their students to reduce their margins to “0.75, change the font size to 11, change line spacing to 1.5, and print on both sides of the paper.
Staff summary
Faculty summary
The full report for this study is available in PDF by clicking here.
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