Because printing costs have remained steady for the last several years, Computing Services Technical Operations Manager Michael Hogan said the College has no plans to stop offering free laser printing to its students.
Hogan said free laser printing has cost about $32,400 each of the last two years. He said about $11,000 is spent on printer paper and $20,000 on toner cartridges.
Each year, Kiewit Computation Center's free laser printers churn out more than 2.5 million pages of written material, which is equal to about 434 miles of paper laid end-to-end, approximately three times the distance from Hanover to Boston.
Besides the laser printing, the College also offers rough draft printing, large document printing and color printing. All of the services are free except for color printing.
The College started offering draft laser printing on the back of previously-used paper three years ago to address environmental concerns and to celebrate Earth Day. Hogan said the draft printer uses documents that were unclaimed 48 hours after being printed.
By printing draft documents, Kiewit saves about 150,000 sheets of paper and $700 per year, Hogan said.
Hogan said Kiewit also cuts waste on printing by telling students to only print one copy of each document.
In addition, the CheckPrint program avoids the common situation of a student printing his or her document, going to Kiewit to pick it up and printing it again when they do not find it in the bin.
Hogan said by using CheckPrint, students can tell if their document is in the queue to be printed and wasteful second-printings can be minimized.
Color printing, which has been available since last summer, is different from the other printing services because students are charged a fee for each page of printing.
In order to use the Tektronix 200i Color Printer, Kiewit charges $1 a page and $2 a transparency. The rates for color printing cover the cost of paper, transparencies and ink-film, which is projected at $3,000 per year.
To print the massive volume of documents, Kiewit relies on seven printers: two Laserwriter IIGs, four Laserwriter16/600 PSs and one IIIsi Hewlett-Packard. The four 16/600s are relatively new, Hogan said.
"About six months ago we replaced the IIG printers with new Apple printers," Hogan said, referring to the new 16/600s.
"We replaced these so we could get the listings printed out faster," he added.
According to Hogan, the new 16/600s print about 16 pages a minute --about twice the speed of the IIGs.
"Things are going pretty smoothly. The new printers make a big difference," he said.
