Special report: Schools seek green light

Ricoh and partner Midwich invited stakeholders and resellers to a roundtable discussion at CRN on how print solutions can help schools go green, Fleur Doidge reports

Back to school: Energy-efficient printers can cut classroom carbon footprints

Ricoh, alongside new distribution partner Midwich, has renewed its GelSprinter push this year and expanded beyond the home office or SME customer, with an eye to the education market. So is the education sector worth pursuing and can GelSprinters give VARs an edge?

Simon Barclay, pre-sales technical consultant from Nottingham-based Ramesys IT, does a lot of work in the education arena. The market is certainly attracting more interest from vendors and their channel partners.

"I think there are more companies trying to muscle into this space, perhaps due in part to the downturn in the corporate sector," he says.

Money is available

Money is available for education implementations and competition in this market is intensifying. Meanwhile, cutting printing costs is one way schools are trying to save money - ­ either by limiting the amount of printing done or by having fewer, more efficient printers, says Barclay.

He says that schools have also been eyeing consolidation of printing functions. A large multi-functional device (MFD) might be hosted in each department, and individual classroom jobs can be printed off at that single printer.
"It can be the most cost-effective way to manage printing," he says.
Richard Green, project advisor for technical strategy at the government's British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), agrees.

"They are going from maybe several printers at one school to fewer," he says. "So when they buy printers, they are looking outside the more traditional sort of product that costs them a fortune in toner."

Jonathan Francis, printing and imaging business manager at Norfolk-based Midwich, says a lot of the marketing the distributor is performing is aimed at the first quarter of 2009. Schools are thinking about next year's spend now.

"We are working closely with a lot of our vendors, including Ricoh, to target education," says Francis.

Richard Allison, IT channel manager at Ricoh, says hard times mean that vendors are seeking to work better with their supply chain, particularly channel partners.

"But we believe that with our gel technology we have something unique to offer the education market as well, and Ricoh is still quite a new brand in the IT channel," he claims.

Allison says the vendor's core MFD business is growing, but Ricoh's strategy is to grow its production base and the lower-end business. The company wants to raise channel awareness of its entire portfolio. However, the GelSprinter range uses a different, although no longer new, technology.

GelSprinters use a fast-evaporating liquid gel - ­ as opposed to a wax or an ink - ­ and a wider-than-usual, 32.3mm print head. An electrostatic belt transfer system controls the printable area and paper handling capability.
Allison says the fast gelatinising and drying of the gel, which is compatible with plain paper, means that blurring and smudging can be kept to a minimum and users can print duplex pages much faster.

Level Color mode divides the print data into texts and images or graphics. In this mode, text is
printed at normal thickness, while images and graphics are printed at about half the standard thickness, which saves on gel.

Unlike the draft mode available on some printers, Level Color enables clear, legible text while saving on consumables.
Allison says that colour printing costs can be slashed by opting for the Level Color mode, which reduces the colour intensity of the result to 65 per cent.

The printers also have a dual tank system to minimise gel wastage. Gel vacuum packed in the cartridge is fed to the empty head tank via a cartridge tube when the head tank volume falls below a certain level.
According to Ricoh, this means all the gel is used ­ there are no leftovers when a cartridge is due to be replaced. Again, this is a cost-saving measure.

The 384-nozzle print heads are cleaned automatically if unused for a certain amount of time.
The technology, compared with laser, is cost effective to buy and to use ­ another advantage when selling hardware into schools, according to Allison.
"We think gel combines the best features of both laser and inkjet," he says. "And recent acquisitions mean we now have considerably more engineers in the UK to serve our printer customers."

Mark Adams, purchasing manager at IT retailer Galtec, says that services such as Ricoh's soon-to-be launched Click managed print offering are a great way to control printing costs and manage the print function in all sizes and types of organisation.

"Primary schools are also different to further education establishments or secondary schools when it comes to printing needs. Primary is still a printer market, while the further education market is more about managed services," he says.

Adams added that he would like to see gel printing expanded into a higher-capacity printing product, because the efficiencies could be even more useful when printing higher volumes.

GelSprinters use between five per cent and 10 per cent of the power of traditional printers, he claims.Robert Brown, product manager at Ricoh, says it depends which model the customer chooses, but in general, GelSprinters use the electricity of a 40W light bulb when printing.

"It has three levels of energy saver mode," he says. But he added that most machines ­ - regardless of which vendor made them - ­ tend to be set up inefficiently and could make far greater savings if configured and managed properly by the user.
The reseller has a role to play in this, Brown notes.

Allison says the Click service too will be an easy value-add for resellers.

"There are many, many print vendors that have gone to market with other services that profess to be a Click model. But we are not involving leasing companies up front."

He says there is interest in a true on-demand model, in which customers pay only for what they use ­ rather than an up-front cost each month, for example.

Barclay says that controlling the bills is one of the biggest challenges for schools. How does a teacher control what gets printed and what does not? What happens if a classroom or department exceeds its quota or budget for the month? Managed services need to be devised to hand that level of control to the customer.

"If they have already used their allocated budget, what happens then? Do they receive a direct debit?" asks Barclay. "So many schools have been burned by leasing models."

Becta's Green agrees. "Is there a means for better reporting [of print use by the school] or of allocating specific budgets up front?" he asks.

Appealing to classroom IT managers

Such features might prove appealing to classroom IT managers, he says. Resellers should look at offering print management audits of the entire print ecosystem at a school, a classroom or department.
"If you have a printer in each classroom, is there an energy benefit? It seems there is not, if you are using that 40W. Should you install one printer or one MFD?" he asks.

Barclay says it is usually better to have a single large-scale printer, rather than 13 or 14 small ones on standby. The reseller's job is to guide the end user to the best solution for that organisation's needs and show the different benefits and disadvantages to each setup.
"While there may still be schools going for balanced deployments [between desktop printers and MFDs], schools that are moving to new builds over the next few years are going to have to cut support costs dramatically," he says.

Schools are clawing back funding, with approaching regulations about carbon emissions making it an ever more urgent task.
"One client we worked with recently put three printers on each floor - ­ they went from 40 printers down to three," says Barclay.

Schools, like businesses, are doing more with less. The printers that UK schools are now installing are more likely to be expected to print banners and A3, as well as A4, in colour and mono, and have strong security and print management features. Especially as the schools move increasingly to a paperless classroom that favours electronic media.

"That is the largest population that we are looking to target and that is the area in which we are seeing the largest changes. It is a big change for everybody," says Barclay.
Meanwhile, school staff are going to retailers and buying small, cheap desktop printers costing as little as £60 instead. "They feel that is more cost-effective," he adds.

Ricoh's Brown agrees. "The education market is moving away from printers now because of the associated costs," he says.
The right printers could make a difference and an ultra-low-cost printer might prove a false economy, he suggests.

A presentation by Ricoh rival Kyocera-Mita at the recent Green IT Expo in London said that a survey conducted in May and June of 369 employees at a range of UK businesses found 86 per cent were concerned or very concerned about rising energy prices, up from 59 per cent last year.

Seventy-five per cent were concerned or very concerned about recycling, up from 62 per cent last year. About 70 per cent of respondents felt as strongly about pollution or waste disposal, up from 48 per cent and 62 per cent, respectively.
Overall, 77 per cent were concerned or very concerned about environmental issues, including climate change, up from 54 per cent in 2007. Some 50 per cent of the 369 respondents hailed from senior management positions.

In the presentation, Kyocera-Mita quoted Envirowise ­ - a UK government body that offers advice to
businesses on environmental impact ­ figures - that state using one tonne of paper consumes 77,284 litres of water, 1,728 litres of oil, 2.3m3 of landfill space and 4,000kW of energy.

Printing a big focus

It is no surprise then that printing is often a big focus of measures meant to reduce environmental impacts in the workplace.

Green says environmental considerations are becoming a major issue in the education arena, with schools increasingly worried about how to mininimise their carbon footprint.
"Schools as a whole are trying to drive down environmental inefficiencies," he says.

This means that controlling the amount of power used, as well as the volume and toxicity of waste released into the environment is increasingly critical in public sector education buying decisions.
"Schools have been mandated to reach a carbon-neutral state by 2016," he says.

Specifically, reducing paper use and recycling toner cartridges were the top two targets for improvement in the Kyocera-Mita survey. These were closely followed by recycling hardware, slashing energy use, using energy efficient equipment, reducing water use, reducing travel costs, using environmentally friendly suppliers and offsetting carbon emissions.

Many vendors have adopted varying environmental policies and practices when it comes to their print portfolio.
Xerox's Phaser range uses blocks of solid ink ­ a little like a wax crayon ­ instead of liquid or gel. This makes for clean handling and lower costs, because the ink does not require the usual toner cartridge.

Kyocera-Mita has developed a ceramic drum and toner cassette technology with fewer moving parts, which cuts the amount of waste sent to landfill.
Allison says Ricoh has a 100 per cent no landfill policy. The plan is to put no part of its product into
landfill, either recycling or repurposing instead.

"We sell products from recycled toner cartridges. Our printers are turned into lobster pots, traffic bollards, all sorts of things," he says.
Printers have varying levels of energy consumption depending on how they are used, and most users do not optimise the energy-saving features.

Management of printers ­ - whether by an overall policy of reducing printing costs or by features of the technology itself ­ - is key to maximising energy and environmental efficiency, concludes Allison.