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Printout solution includes minimizing waste, impact on students
By Josie Klemaier
jklemaie@mscd.edu

The Print Solutions Committee at Metro is working toward limiting paper waste in Metro computer labs and hopes to reach a resolution by the end of the spring 2007 semester, according to George Middlemist, chief information officer and vice president of Information Technologies at Metro.

The committee is collecting data to aid their decision by using a program that monitors the number of printouts made by each student, as well as an IT open survey online at MetroConnect to all students and faculty.

Middlemist said that the goal is to not impact students negatively, but to determine a reasonable limit on the number of pages the average student needs to print.

“If they have an academic need to print pages, they should be able to print those pages,” he said.
SGA committee members submitted a recommendation letter to the chair of the Print Solutions Committee on Aug. 1, 2006, which said that they would like to see the smallest possible amount of students to be affected by the new printing solution.

Among the concerns about printing, Middlemist said that one is the “green effect,” or amount of waste that is tossed in recycling bins and trashcans in the labs.

According to a June 22, 2006 article in The Metropolitan, 76 percent of students using Metro labs printed between one and 99 pages per semester, and 10 percent of students printed more than 400 pages. Between Jan. 1, 2006, and April 26, 2006, 350 students printed more than 1000 pages, 40 students printed more than 2,000 pages, and one student printed a total of 21,962 pages.

The Print Solutions Committee began discussing how to minimize the waste and exploitation of printing in the labs in June 2006. Since then, the Lab Advisory Committee and the Technology Initiatives Committee, both made up of students, faculty and staff, have been working with the Metro Student Government Assembly’s IT Committee to reach a solution that does not impose on students.

The SGA committee recommended that a limit of 750 pages per student per semester be set, with no penalty imposed during the first semester of the implement, after which a charge would be applied for every page over that limit.

Equitrac, software that monitors lab printing, has been active since January 2006, Middlemist said. When a student prints an excess of 750 pages, they will be given a form to fill out stating their major and why they need to print more pages. Currently, there is no charge for printing any amount of black and white pages.

Another SGA committee member, Carlos Lopez, said the committee is asking IT to work with faculty as well as students to lower print waste. “We are trying to ask IT to be proactive by working with faculty as well as students to lower print waste,” Lopez said.

The letter to the Print Solutions Committee also suggests that any profit made from the overage charges be donated to a cause that helps the environment “so students don’t feel like they are having another fee imposed on them in order to punish them, or make the college and the IT department a profit.”

SGA Senator Andrew Bateman said the committee was discussing using money collected for these charges be used to buy vending machines that sell disks and drives in the computer labs.

“They were talking about using this money to buy more ways to make more money,” Bateman said. “I am not okay with that.”

Middlemist agreed. “That’s not something I would support,” he said. “I don’t think we will make a lot of money off of it.” He said that though it was an idea brought up in the preliminary stages of the process, it is not something anyone is actively pursuing.