Many organizations strive for sustainability to play their role in mitigating climate change, and there’s no shortage of green technology and habits that can help you get there.

A managed print services strategy is a great start, of course, because it can help reduce your environmental footprint through paper output reduction, proper toner cartridge disposal, and smart provisioning of energy efficient, multi-function print devices. But there’s other green technology that can help you bring sustainability to your business.

Sustainability means reducing and reusing, not just recycling

Diverting paper and toner waste from landfills is an obvious no brainer, but your sustainability strategy should extend to all electronic devices where possible. A managed print services program should include a green technology component that gives you peace of mind your retired printers are properly recycled, or where possible, reused through a donation program—perhaps the local community center can use an older yet still functional all-in-one printer that can’t keep up with your document management strategy.

But sustainability should go beyond properly disposing of your old printers—it should extend to any device, including desktops, laptops, corporate smartphones and tablets, and even servers. A green technology strategy also means thinking about how many devices you truly need to deploy. An audit by a managed print services provider can better distribute printers throughout your office and campus locations, for example. Do you really need more than one printer per floor?

When it comes to servers, you might consider minimizing your on-premise footprint and look at how a managed IT services provider can take over some of that infrastructure. Heading to the cloud for sustainability not only reduces the number of servers you may have to dispose of, but the scalability of cloud-based storage also reduces overall power consumption. You can lower your environmental footprint while saving on your electricity bill.

Green technology should consume less power

Reducing the number of devices overall in your organization can help achieve sustainability, but you should also consider the contribution of power saving features in the devices you do deploy.

Energy-efficient workstations and printers that go into sleep mode are not new, but you should also look for devices with cooling technology that also reduces energy use. Green technology isn’t just about how well these devices manage power consumption; it’s also what they’re made off. When doing a desktop or printer refresh, consider product lines built from post-consumer recycle plastic where possible. This philosophy can not only be applied to your IT infrastructure, but also the appliances in the staff kitchen or even the office furniture.

Your office building can potentially contribute to sustainability too. They can be equipped with green technology so that rooms such as your data center are only lit when people are working in them thanks to motion sensors. That same technology can now control HVAC systems, so that air conditioning or heating is automatically adjusted to save power based on how people are in the room. You can further reduce your power consumption footprint by choosing an energy provider that has a sustainability strategy because it uses renewable sources.

Sustainability is ultimately a culmination of many initiatives, not just one, including the deployment of green technology. However, you need to start somewhere, so consider how a managed print services strategy can not only save you money on printing and toner but also use it more wisely.