Guest blog post by Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Rebecca Blank

Earth Day is here, and Commerce is seeing the positive results of its year-long campaign to “go green” and drive down costs in print. Just this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Commerce’s largest bureau, announced it has removed over one-third of its desktop printers, bringing total savings from the Commerce print project to $4.7 million per year.

Commerce spends $25 million annually on print–which includes equipment, paper, toner, energy and services. Last year we took a look at where that money was going and found that:

• Commerce printed 250 million pages on its networked printers.
• Nearly all of those pages were printed single-sided, and a quarter were printed in color. 
• We also had a high ratio of employees-to-desktop printers, which use more toner and are more expensive than shared printers.  
• And we realized we had 350 contracts and 400 vendors, with very little centralized ordering.