The piles of wasted paper in the computer pods are shrinking.
This semester, Information Technology Services implemented a new printing system called Pharos.
ITS and ASUNM adopted Pharos in hopes of making printing less wasteful and more efficient for students, said Moira Gerety, director of ITS.
Gerety said ITS recently reviewed its practices and found changes had to be made.
"It became an issue of how we can provide a free service to students and cut our waste," she said.
In order to print a document under the new system, after commanding the computer to print, students must swipe their Lobo IDs at a print station and personally release the document to the printer, Gerety said.
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She said this adds another step to the process of printing so that students will consider carefully before they print and ensure they only print once.
Mark Harty, the manager of Faculty and Student Support Services at ITS, said this system will help reduce the cost of printing ITS absorbs, since students are allowed free printing in the computer pods.
"As we went through the review (of ITS costs), what came up initially was pod printing," Gerety said. "The immediate suggestion was to charge for printing."
She said ITS didn't want to do that and began working with ASUNM to find another solution.
Harty said Pharos was the right choice.
"Any time you implement a print-management job, it saves a lot of resources," Harty said.
Last year, the Lobo Lab reported printing about 125,000 pages per week. The amount of wasted paper and ink became a large expense to the University.
Richard Talley, a student employee at ITS, said there were bins crammed with recycled paper every day.
"We needed to get control of all the waste," he said. "Students would come in, they would start to print and realize that they had to go to class, run out and then abandon their print jobs."
ITS began working with ASUNM this summer to develop a green campaign and curb printing levels without charging a fee for printing, said Ashley Fate, ASUNM president.
She said implementing the Pharos system was aimed at making students more aware of the paper waste they create.
ASUNM has also placed clear plastic bins in some of the pods where unclaimed print jobs are put at the end of the day, Fate said, so that students can see how much paper is wasted.
"This way, people will understand the waste we have been
generating and the impact we will have on our environment when we are irresponsible with waste," she said.
Harty said Pharos provides more flexibility for printing on campus because once students press print and the job is put into the system, students can swipe their card on one of numerous printers on campus up to four hours later. This means students could set up a paper to print before their first class in the morning and print it at another computer pod for their afternoon class.
"This is intended to help the students protect printing jobs and remind them to reduce printing," he said.
Harty said the system is part of a campuswide green initiative.
"This will be mainly a change in thought and procedure, and it will take a while to catch on," he said.
