Print is one of the few office activities that affects almost every environmental category at once: it draws energy, consumes paper, depends on a steady stream of toner and ink, and relies on hardware that must eventually be disposed of. Because it usually accumulates over years rather than being designed deliberately, it is also one of the areas where the easiest environmental improvements are still available, and often overlooked.
Last updated: 26th July 2026
Author: Mark Lyons, Managed Print Services Specialist, Datapac
A managed approach to print reduces environmental impact by addressing four things at once: right-sizing the fleet to cut energy use, eliminating wasted pages through secure print release and duplex defaults, routing consumables into remanufacture rather than landfill, and managing hardware responsibly across its full lifecycle. This guide explains the environmental by-products of print, why “going digital” is not automatically greener, and how each by-product can be reduced in practice.
The four environmental by-products of print, at a glance:
| By-product | Why it matters | How a managed approach reduces it |
|---|---|---|
| Consumables | Cartridges are plastic and metal with a finite life; across a fleet they form a continuous waste stream. | Remanufacture and responsible recycling instead of landfill. |
| Energy | Devices draw power around the clock; an oversized fleet wastes energy by device count, not usage. | Right-sizing to fewer, better-placed devices. |
| Paper | Most waste is paper printed but never collected, duplicated, or printed single-sided. | Secure print release and duplex set as the default. |
| Devices | Each machine carries a manufacturing footprint and an end-of-life disposal challenge. | Lifecycle management: maintain, extend life, recycle responsibly. |
The Environmental By-Products of Print
Most of print’s impact is invisible at the point of use. Pressing “print” produces a single sheet of paper; what it hides is the chain of inputs and outputs behind it. It helps to think of print as having four distinct environmental by-products, each behaving differently and needing a different response.
Consumables. Toner and ink cartridges are the by-product most people picture first: manufactured objects of plastic and metal, often holding residual chemicals, with a finite life and somewhere to go afterwards. Across a fleet and across years, they form a continuous stream of material. Whether that stream ends in landfill or in remanufacture makes a substantial difference to its footprint.
Energy. Devices draw power continuously, not only when printing. Many idle around the clock, waking and warming regardless of use. An oversized or poorly distributed fleet consumes energy in proportion to the number of devices, not the useful work they do, which is why device count, rather than page count, is often the more important environmental number.
Paper. Paper’s impact is routinely mischaracterised. The waste is rarely the paper printed and used; it is the paper printed and never collected, printed in duplicate, or printed single-sided out of habit. The cost sits in the gap between what is produced and what is genuinely needed, and that gap is usually wider than assumed.
The devices themselves. Every printer carries an environmental cost embedded in its manufacture and a disposal challenge at end of life. A fleet that turns over too often, or is retired without responsible recycling, carries a footprint that has nothing to do with how much it printed and everything to do with how it was managed.
These by-products are not reduced by the same actions. Cutting paper does nothing for the energy drawn by an idle fleet; recycling cartridges does nothing about over-deployment. A serious approach has to address all four at once, which is why piecemeal efforts can fall short. On a more positive note, it also means that the problem is more solvable than it feels. An environment no one has examined as a whole is usually one where a single structured pass can improve everything together.
Is Going Paperless Actually More Sustainable?
Not automatically. It is tempting to conclude that the answer to print’s footprint is simply to stop printing, but the reality is more complicated, and worth being honest about.
Digital storage feels weightless. A scanned file seems to cost nothing, take up no space, and burden no one. But every stored document lives somewhere physical: in a data centre that draws electricity every hour of every day it exists, and that increasingly consumes large quantities of clean water to stay cool. In Ireland, that reality has become harder to ignore. The infrastructure behind our seemingly weightless files competes for the same power and water as everything else, on a scale most people never picture when they hit “save”.
Digital storage also removed the one thing that used to keep storage honest: a natural limit. A physical filing cabinet regulates itself; when it fills, that is an obvious, visible inconvenience, and someone is forced to decide what actually needs keeping. Cloud storage abolishes that signal; nothing ever looks full. So the same document is scanned, emailed, and re-saved until a dozen near-identical copies sit across inboxes and drives, each drawing power indefinitely, none of them ever prompting the question a bulging cabinet asked automatically: do we really need all of this?
The point is not that digital is bad. It is that “digital” and “sustainable” are not the same word. The genuine environmental gain never came from moving paper onto screens for its own sake; it came from eliminating work that did not need to happen: the duplicate prints, the documents produced and never read, the pages sent to a device and abandoned.
How Managed Print Services Reduce Environmental Impact
A managed approach is less about buying different printers than about applying structure, measurement, and consistent defaults to an environment that grew without them. Four mechanisms do most of the work:
Right-sizing the fleet. Matching the number and type of devices to how an organisation actually works is the single largest lever on energy. Fewer, better-placed devices draw less power and embody less manufactured hardware while still meeting real need.
Controlling waste through defaults. Secure print release, where a job prints only once the user authenticates at the device, cancels the abandoned print runs that waste paper and toner. Duplex printing set as the default, rather than left as an option, has a similar structural effect on paper use. Changing the default achieves more, and more reliably, than asking people to remember.
Measuring what is really happening. When an organisation can see its true print volumes and trends, including pages sent but never collected, sustainability stops being guesswork and targets become measurable. That visibility is what lets an ESG lead report credibly rather than estimate.
Managing the full device lifecycle. Responsible handling from deployment to decommissioning addresses the by-products at both ends of the chain: maintenance that extends device life, remanufacture of consumables, and responsible end-of-life recycling rather than landfill.
None of these is dramatic in isolation. Applied together and maintained over time, they address all four by-products at once — which is why sustainability, in this framing, is not a separate initiative bolted onto print management, but something good print management produces as a by-product of its own.
Why Print Sustainability Stalls Inside Organisations
Part of why print sustainability goes unaddressed is that no single person owns it, and those who touch it see it differently. Finance tends to treat print as a cost line and sustainability as something separate, yet the waste that inflates spend is the same waste that inflates the footprint, so reducing one usually reduces the other. IT is typically involved in selecting and scoping the fleet, and for IT the environmental question is bound up with manageability: a sprawling, inconsistent estate is both harder to support and harder to make efficient, so standardisation and fewer, better-placed devices serve both goals at once. Recognising these different perspectives is often what turns print sustainability from everyone’s vague concern into someone’s actionable project.
Print, ISO 14001, and Demonstrating Continuous Improvement
For organisations working towards or maintaining environmental certification such as ISO 14001, print offers something valuable: evidence. The standard is built around continual improvement, and print lends itself naturally to exactly that. The improvements a good provider relationship produces tend to be incremental and ongoing, such as a fleet gradually right-sized, print volumes steadily reduced, consumables routed into remanufacture, and reporting that shows the trend over time. That is precisely the kind of demonstrable, documented progress an auditor wants to see.
Working with a provider that already holds ISO 14001, as Datapac has for many years, shortens the path considerably, because the processes, reporting, and responsible-disposal chains that underpin the evidence are already in place rather than something you must build from scratch.
Reviewing Your Own Print Environment
Print sustainability suffers the same fate as print cost: because the environment still works, there is rarely a trigger to examine it, so it stays one of the last areas anyone looks at — and one of the most improvable, precisely because it has been left alone. The challenges it surfaces are, almost without exception, highly solvable ones. If it would help to understand the footprint of your own print environment, we are glad to carry out a short, independent review with no cost and no obligation — more often than not, simply seeing the numbers is enough to make the next step obvious, and easier than expected. Simply click the link below to get in touch with our experts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is printing bad for the environment?
Print has a real environmental footprint across four areas — energy, paper, consumables, and hardware — but the impact varies enormously depending on how a print environment is managed. Much of the waste comes not from necessary printing but from over-deployed devices, abandoned print jobs, and consumables sent to landfill, all of which can be reduced without stopping printing altogether.
Is going paperless better for the environment than printing?
Not automatically. Digital storage carries its own footprint: data centres draw electricity continuously and consume significant water for cooling, and stored files often multiply into many near-identical copies that each draw power indefinitely. The genuine environmental gain comes from eliminating unnecessary work rather than simply moving paper onto screens.
How do managed print services reduce environmental impact?
By addressing four by-products at once: right-sizing the fleet to cut energy use, eliminating wasted pages through secure print release and duplex defaults, routing consumables into remanufacture instead of landfill, and managing hardware responsibly across its full lifecycle. Measurement ties it together by making print volumes visible and targets trackable.
Can print support ISO 14001 certification?
ISO 14001 is built around continual improvement, and print naturally produces the kind of incremental, documented progress auditors look for — a fleet right-sized over time, volumes reduced, consumables remanufactured, and reporting that evidences the trend. Working with a provider that already holds the standard makes that evidence easier to produce.
What is the most sustainable way to manage office printing?
Treat it as a managed environment rather than a collection of devices: right-size the fleet, set duplex and secure print release as defaults, measure actual volumes, and manage hardware and consumables responsibly to end of life. Addressing all four by-products together achieves far more than tackling any one in isolation.