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From: jfw@ksr.com (John F. Woods)
Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy
Subject: Re: Cutting excessive student use of printer paper
Message-ID: <3985@ksr.com>
Date: 12 Jun 91 14:04:05 GMT
Article-I.D.: ksr.3985
References: <1429@sol.deakin.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@ksr.com
Distribution: aus
Lines: 27

carterp@deakin.OZ.AU (Phil Carter) writes:
>    We have a number of laser printers, HP DeskJets, etc about the
>campus which use single sheet paper. We are finding that students
>are using an enormous amount of paper and ink (the DeskJet ink
>costs more than the paper) and that 99% of students' printout
>finishes in the garbage bin. We want to cut down on the wastage

What kind of terminals do you have?  Looking at a program or a large paper
on a 24x80 is vastly inferior to being able to spread out a stack of paper
and look at 5 or 6 sheets at once.  Large-screen graphics terminals almost
make that possible.

The next question would be why are the expensive printers the only ones
available?  It would make more sense to have several high-speed line printers
that use cheap paper; if the turnaround faster than a laser printer (not hard
to do) people will naturally prefer it unless they have a compelling reason
for quality output.

You can possibly reduce the paper costs by using recycled paper and by
recycling the used printer paper (I don't know offhand what the market for
recycled paper is like in Australia, though).  That doesn't help the problem
of the cost of DeskJet ink, but hey, you bought a one-time cheap printer with
high operating costs...

If you just simply want to stop students from printing things, the answer
is really simple:  don't give them computer accounts.  That way, they don't
use up expensive electricity, either.