The retail sector in Europe outstrips other sectors with regard to the highest rate of paper wastage. A quarter of all pages in the workplace are printed for nothing, according to research conducted by Ipsos, on behalf of Lexmark.
The survey, conducted between February and March this year, interviewed 2 837 office workers across Europe. Research reveals that an average employee prints 34 pages per day and a fifth of these (17%) are never used.
Europe’s smallest companies have interestingly been dubbed the ”biggest wasters”. Seemingly more sensitive to costs, they’re actually the most wasteful, with the average employee wasting 21% of printed pages. Larger enterprises have a wastage rate of only 15%.
”Construction and financial services closely follow retail with the second- and third-highest wastage rates — 21% and 18% respectively,” said Lexmark in a press statement.
The private sectors share an almost-identical wastage rate to the public sector, with only a 1% difference (17%). An average public-sector employee prints 31 pages per day, whilst a private-sector employee prints a staggering 38.
However, according to research, employees are not willing to admit that they are part of the paper-wastage problem and are unaware of the impact of wasting paper.
In the public sector, half of the employees (51%) agree that there is extensive paper wastage in their company, but three quarters (76%) say they don’t contribute to it.
Ipsos said in a statement: ”The research we conducted for Lexmark highlights that office workers across Europe are unaware of the serious consequences of paper wastage, with very few admitting that they are contributing to the problem.”
”In South Africa, we find that the extent of the wastage problem is similar, and that it goes right up to the boardroom, where senior executives are unaware of the bottom-line impact of bad printing habits,” said Hans Horn, the managing director of Lexmark South Africa, in a statement to the media on Monday.
”We are urging people to think before they print, and to print less,” he said.