Print control software

A single office worker can print out up to 15,000 A4 sheets of paper a year. By a conservative estimate, a business of, say, 5000 people creates 65 t of CO2 through the paper they use each year.

Intelligent Print Control from IBM and Ricoh's InfoPrint Solutions venture is claimed to be able to cut these CO2 emissions by half. The software cuts paper use by automatically choosing the most appropriate printer setting for each document. Most office printers have settings to use less paper but they are hidden away behind layers of computer menus, making them inaccessible to most users.

Almost all office printers today are capable of printing double-sided or two-up (two pages on each side of the paper). And most printers have the ability to use less of the expensive toner that produces the image.

With IBM's print control, the user just has to click the print icon and the print jobs will come out automatically in the appropriate format. The program works with any model of printer.

Each user of an office printer can have his or her own printing profile. The user selects their printing preferences once - rather than every time they use the printer.

Text recognition algorithms can be set to detect words such as 'draft' or 'final' in documents and change printer settings to match.