Computing@Thayer

There is lots of talk about energy around Thayer School. We think a lot about it Computing Services too. Computers and Printers at Thayer are a significant source of electricity and resource consumption. Jordan has been working at reducing electricity use in the Windows lab (see his recent blog post here).

I’ve recently started looking at printer and copier use. I’ve only gathered preliminary data so far, but the hope is to some day have a web page with real time statistics.

For the preliminary data, I chose to look at printer use over the first 30 days of the Fall term (Sep. 24 to Oct. 24)

Nearly all print jobs at Thayer go through our print servers. Part of the path includes the software PaperCut. Among other things, PaperCut keeps track of how many prints each printer makes. I used PaperCut’s numbers for the number of prints made in Thayer. In the future, we’ll likely just request the number of printed pages directly from the printers using SNMP.

According to PaperCut, in the first 30 days of the Fall term, Thayer printed 129,118 pages. That accounts for about 258 reams of paper. Using a ruler, I found that each ream of paper is about 2.16″ inches high. That means, if you were to stack all 129,118 pages in one neat stack, it would be over 46 feet tall! To get a better sense of how much paper that is, to the right you can see a photo of our own 5′ 6″ Matt Dricker standing next to a 46 foot stack of paper. If the number 129,118 didn’t already seem like a lot, suddenly this graphic drives the point home… we do not living in a paperless office.

The above data also doesn’t include photocopiers. According to Ken Clifford, Manager, Copy & Mailing Services, Thayer use another 260 reams of paper per month for copiers. So double the height of the stack of paper in the image to the right, and you’ll get an approximation of how much paper is used each month at Thayer.

We hope that by sharing this information, and educating people about printing double-sided, or alternatives to printing altogether, the use of paper (and toner) will be reduced.