More than £1bn a year is wasted across UK government and industry through inefficient business printing, according to an economic impact study released by OKI Printing Solutions.
The findings reveal that a staggering £16.7bn is spent annually in the UK on printing which is equivalent to the GDP of Cuba. The scale of waste is so great that leading economists believe it is hampering business growth, reducing productivity and damaging the UK's economy.
Among the worst offenders for wasting resources through printing are the education and public administration sectors, which lose around £225m a year through excessive outsourcing and poor internal print management. This figure represents almost a quarter of the £1bn chancellor Gordon Brown hopes to raise through recent increases in air travel taxes.
The report, 'Outsourced Printing - A Waste of Paper' was produced by OKI Printing Solutions and leading economic research consultancy, CEBR (The Centre for Economic Business Research). It reveals that major savings can be made across both public and private sectors simply by reducing outsourced printing and by more fully utilising the capabilities of their office printers.
'Improving the organisation of printing - currently regarded as a relatively small area of business management - could yield productivity benefits of as much as £1bn a year, said Douglas McWilliams, chief executive at CEBR. 'This amounts to some 0.1 per cent of national income: enough to have a real knock-on effect for the whole UK economy, as well as individual businesses.'
The education sector is identified as the largest potential beneficiary of bringing more printing in-house and better internal printing practices with scope for savings of £115m a year.
This represents a quarter of its total outsourced printing expenditure, an amount which could free up enough resources to fill existing teaching vacancies in the UK for a year more than twice over, or fund 2.2 million primary school dinners.
The public administration and defence sector could also save around £110m of the £510 m it currently spends annually on outsourced printing. Another sector which could make substantial savings is banking and finance where over £71m of savings could be made each year.
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