Save Printing Cost : Save Ink, Save Paper & Save Money - An Interview with ecoPrint's Jack Momose

How can a large office afford its printing costs? I ask this because every month I print over 200 pages worth of online newsletters, and this costs me about $189 dollars a year, not to mention 1 tree, 365,841 kilojoules of energy, 24 kilograms of CO2, 659 liters of water, and 9 kilograms of solid waste. You're probably thinking, how does this guy know all of these specifics details? You too can calculate your printer's ecological footprint (and financial cost) online, at ecoprintsaver.com. I caught up with Jack Momose, the man behind ecoprint, to learn how to reduce my printing costs:

Travis: Cogen Media is a dynamic, international software developer and innovator that produces a number of products. You've developed two very thrifty products called Ecoprint 2 and Ecoprint2 Pro, and I believe they've been available for about a year now. Please tell me what inspired you to create these two products that are not only thrifty because they reduce printing costs, but they're also environmentally friendly.

Jack: I've always noticed waste around the office printer, in schools, corporate, home office, anywhere you have a printer, you have stray paper with a couple of unread lines of fine print, a recycling box full to the brim, and of course astronomically expensive ink flowing down the drain. So I wanted to come up with a product that would help people and businesses to better control this cost and, even more importantly, help improve the environmental impact of printing.

Travis: Please tell me a bit about how the technology works and why it's so successful at reducing waste and printing costs.

Jack: Okay. Let me make one thing very clear first. Often, people believe that by selecting the ‘fast' or ‘draft' setting on their printer's software, they are saving on ink. This is totally false. Why would a printer manufacturer, who sells ink, want you to save on ink? They don't. So, ecoPrint allows you to select exactly what percentage of ink savings you want. When you install and use ecoPrint, you can save up to 75 per cent more ink, every time you print. This is significant savings over months and years, especially in a large office where printing costs can run hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The software actually includes a saving calculator so you can see exactly how much money you are saving by taking control of your printing. This covers the ink side of things, but as far as paper savings are concerned, the user has so many options to modify the page so that they can save: deleting pages, blank pages, manual margin setting, numerous page layout options that will allow you to print two, four, eight, or even 16 pages on one page. So, if say, you have a 40 page contract to read and you're going to be traveling, say you want to read it on the plane. Instead of printing 40 pages, you can print 20 or even 10.

Travis: Approximately how much waste is produced by printers, and how can ecoprint product users determine their own printer's ecological footprint? I know that numerous appliances, and certainly cars, carry large environmental costs, but how about printers? In terms of the environment, how important is it to curb reckless printer usage?

Jack: It's very important and people would be very surprised to know just how much waste their home computer does produce, let alone their business office. If you print an average of five pages a day, you're producing 21 pounds of solid waste, 174 gallons of waste water, and 52 pounds of CO2 equivalent. You're also burning through about half a tree a year. To put into perspective, if paper printing in the U.S. was cut by 10 per cent, 1.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions would also be cut. That's significant. Do printers pollute like cars? No. But, it's quite easy to curb this large environmental cost by making a few changes, and ecoprint makes it easy. I believe it's important for our culture to take on reducing all sorts of waste, and being a software developer, this made the most sense to me, as a way I could contribute. Create a thrifty product that not only saves people money, but also the planet.

Travis: I know these products are suitable for both home and office printing. Can you tell me about the system requirements and are there different versions for different types of users (i.e. those using ecoprint at home versus those using it at an office)?

Jack: It's all on the website in a very easy to use Support Centre. The products are easy to install and they work on all Windows 2000 professional, Windows XP edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista (32 bit) and now Windows 7. It's very easy to use and, as I said, our website has great support.

Travis: At Thrift Culture Now, we focus on teaching people to treat their household like a business, and to look closely at all costs, how they ebb and flow, and to find ways to protect themselves against rising costs in food, utilities, and even taxes. Your products, EcoPrint2 and EcoPrint2 Pro, are two excellent ways that people can protect themselves against the high costs of printing. What thrifty measures have you applied as a business owner so that your company may continue to grow and develop great new products for your customers in the future?

Jack: Actually, it's good you ask this, because I happen to be using another of our products, eBoostr Pro, and it's allowing us to save big time on computers. Well, let me be clear and provide an example: It's a big problem, electronic waste and old computers are a HUGE culprit, maybe the greatest contributor since they become ‘slow,' or the technology becomes obsolete and people just buy new ones. The fact is, the number one cause of slow computers is not the CPU or the RAM, it's the amount of work your hard drive needs to do. All of the thousands of files that have to be accessed by the hard drive when you start and run an application like email or a website, and your hard drive needs to find them. The hard drive is slower than the RAM or CPU so the computer is always waiting on the hard drive. We solved this problem.