USG, OIT propose printing quota

Correction appended

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) and the USG proposed a 3,000-pages-per-student printing quota as part of a larger sustainability initiative at a meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) on Monday afternoon.

The two groups are collaborating on an initiative to reduce library and cluster printing, with the ultimate goal of decreasing total student paper consumption by 20 percent — from 10.6 million to 8.5 million pages — by April 2010.

Students, all of whom are permitted to print free of charge, were responsible for 20 percent of all printing at the University during the 2007 fiscal year.

“We’re ready to set a new standard for printing on this campus, and we hope the other 80 percent will be able follow suit,” USG president Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10 said at the meeting.

In addition to the printing quota, the USG hopes to change the default settings on all cluster printers to print four pages per sheet with one-inch margins, Diemand-Yauman added. Currently, double-sided printing is standard on cluster computers.

“These new settings would cut the number of pages in half,” he noted. “This will be the new standard, the new benchmark, the new normal.”

Last year, the University purchased a total of 53 million pages of paper. Stacked, this amount of paper would reach nearly two miles into the sky or cover an area of more than 800 acres.

“Student printing has been steadily going up over the last five years,” OIT director Steven Sather said. “Each year we’re looking at an addition of — in a good year — 5 percent to over 15 percent [in a bad year].”

Central to the plan aimed at countering unnecessary paper use is the implementation of a printing quota of 3,000 pages per student, Diemand-Yauman said. Last year, the average number of pages printed by an individual student was 1,291, with a standard deviation of 1,446, Sather said.

“If we enact a 3,000-page quota, that will affect less than 10 percent of the student body,” Diemand-Yauman said. “That’s 1.1 [million pieces of] paper just by controlling those outliers.”

U-Councilor Brian No ’10, who serves on the USG’s sustainability committee, said the the University’s existing technology could be used to enforce the quota since print release stations can be programmed to cap student printing.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

But OIT and USG are also concerned the proposed policy might have some negative impacts.

“If we set a limit on 1,500 sheets of paper, that’s actually well above the mean of what people print,” Sather said. “But if everybody says, ‘Oh, I can print up to 1,500 pieces of paper,’ we would actually drive up the printing on campus by 25 percent.”

Different paper quotas would apply to various subsets of the University community, including undergraduates of different class years, graduate students, faculty and staff, Sather said. The policy would also allow faculty members to allocate additional printing allowances beyond the quota.

No said that some students have legitimate reasons to exceed the quota, especially upperclassmen working on junior papers and senior theses. “It would be stupid to tell a junior who has reached his cap that he can’t print out his JP,” No said in an e-mail. “For exceptions to the cap, we hope to establish some sort of centralized, efficient process so that students can request a higher printing ceiling.”

USG and OIT are also working to install PDF annotation software on all laptops sold through the University and cluster computers. The software would allow note-taking directly on PDF documents, eliminating the need to print documents, Diemand-Yauman explained.

To increase awareness of the initiative, the USG is planning to circulate a Student Sustainability Pledge, he said. The pledge will encourage students to make minor lifestyle changes that could significantly impact Princeton’s overall sustainability efforts.

Diemand-Yauman said the printing policy is part of a larger USG initiative to tackle student recycling, water use and electricity use on campus.

“If implemented, it is our hope that this policy will promote [a] culture shift, and the cultureshift will in turn promote the policy,” Diemand-Yauman said in an e-mail.

Correction

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that 1.1 meters of paper could be saved by controlling outliers. In fact, 1.1 million pieces of paper could be saved.