Alec Milne, president of PrintersPlus of Ottawa, says his firm’s green initiatives around print management have become a competitive advantage.
“It now plays into just about every agreement that we have now, and is the primary part of our presentations. Every printer that we sell now addresses the pros and cons related to the environment.”
His company provides for their customers in-depth analysis into the carbon footprint of their aging fleet of printers to enable them to add printing services to their green efforts. But even more importantly, Milne says PritnersPlus pays diligently close attention to toner best practices for its customers.
He says that manufacturers have improved their efforts in taking back and recycling their toner.
“Manufacturers have recognized that if they wish to maintain supplying their printers, they have to do a much better job,” Milne says. “To that end our suppliers, such as Lexmark and Samsung, have all done a great job of saying, ‘OK, you send us back your empties and we’ll recycle what we can recycle and we’ll break down and discard appropriately what we cannot.”
Milne says his focus on environmental issues around toner is well-founded, because he believes supplies should be the number one issue when it comes to printers. It is, he notes, the cartridge and the supplies that end up in the landfill.