Our commitment to sustainability includes helping you find ways to work smarter and faster, while improving your bottom line and the environment.

Since our earliest days, we have strived to find ways to make the office more sustainable. We invented technology to enable two-side copying and introduced the first recycled grade of cut sheet paper. The use of both has become second nature for many. Here are tips using the latest product features and functionalities to make your office more sustainable.

Read: Enabling sustainability for Our customers and our operations (PDF)

Steps to a more sustainable office

Use a print driver that makes sustainable printing easy. Adjust your print driver default settings to automatically print on both sides of the sheet. Deselect the cover sheet and you’ll avoid printing a sheet unnecessarily. If you want others to know it’s your print, select the watermark option and you can place your initials or some other identifier on the sheet in a conspicuous fashion.
Select energy-efficient printers and multi-function printers that bear the EPA Energy Star and EPEAT eco labels. Products carrying the EPEAT logo meet Energy Star and additional criteria covering every stage of the product lifecycle — design, manufacture, supply chain, use phase and end-of-life.
Verify the authenticity of your toner cartridges. Counterfeit toner cartridges are difficult to distinguish from genuine Xerox cartridges. Counterfeit cartridges are a combination of refilled/remanufactured and brand-new third-party cartridges boxed in replicas of Xerox original packaging. Unlike Xerox, counterfeiters have no regard for the quality, reliability or safety concerns that bogus cartridges pose.
Engage your employees in fun ways using the Xerox Print Awareness Tool. The tool raises employees’ awareness about the impacts of their printing decisions and can communicate office “news” using the customisable posting feature.
Go carbon neutral. Print ReLeaf plants a precise number of trees based on your paper consumption, helping to offset the GHGs associated with printing.
Use scanning to enable digital workflows. By turning manual, paper-based processes into efficient, digital ones, you’ll save paper, time and money and reduce the number of errors. With Xerox ConnectKey you can even convert paper documents to an MP3 audio file you can listen to.
Use the Green World Alliance recycling programme, which prevents millions of supply items from entering landfills each year. You can even consolidate returns of five to 30 used supply items in a single box and ship them to us.
Transform your paper documents into flexible, more usable Word or Excel formats with Xerox ConnectKey apps. Translate them into other languages. Turn printed documents into digital resources. Easily scan, and immediately archive and retrieve information. To make critical content accessible and searchable, your MFP can route documents through your network directly to its end location, whether locally or in the cloud.
Implement secure printing to hold print jobs at the device until a user enters a Pin to claim them. A time-out feature deletes unclaimed jobs preventing forgotten prints from piling up at the device.
Look for pre-owned or remanufactured equipment produced to meet original factory specifications. It’s tested and checked by Xerox technicians and comes with a warranty. Buying remanufactured saves you money, and saves millions of kilograms of material from entering landfills.

About Bytes Document Solutions
Altron Bytes Document Solutions (BDS) is Africa’s leading document management technology and services company and the largest Xerox distributor in the world. It is the authorised Xerox distributor in 26 sub-Saharan countries offering the complete range of Xerox document equipment, software solutions and services. BDS forms part of JSE-listed Allied Electronics Corporation (Altron).