[Wolves] Environmental impact of websites

[David Goodwin]

Chris Procter wrote:
> Am I the only person who had to pay per sheet for printouts at college/uni
> at 5p a sheet you find that 50 page document costs you £2.50 (aka a pint of
> beer) and realise you can live without it.
> 

No, we had to pay in Aberystwyth as well. When I started Uni we were 
allocated 20 pages per week free (b&w), and there was always waste paper 
lying around printers and suchlike (Black and White porn anyone? ;) )

A large part of the wastage came from the system itself, as all 
printouts had a cover page stating your login, what quota you had in 
credit etc... which went straight into the bin. I think they had 
recycling bins for paper there quite early on though.


About 2-3 years ago they decided to start charging for the system, at 
initially 2p per page (i think?), and withdrew any free weekly quota 
(although I think students had 100 free pages at the start of their 
course). This resulted in a lot of fuss and moaning from students, but 
did save quite a lot on paper costs/wastage. The students naturally 
complained that they *had* to print work before it could be handed in to 
be marked...... which really leads on to why couldn't they just submit 
it electronically!?


Computer Science, of course, maintained a free dot matrix printer for 
code print out, which didn't seem to get as abused as e.g. the laser 
printers were... until a few people found some large ASCII pr0n pictures 
and thought they'd be funny.



The only bad thing about the system was that it was quite expensive to 
buy more paper (perhaps 4p per sheet of b&w) and the cost for printing 
or photo copying was the same - which shouldn't be the case as photo 
copying is cheaper (i'd have thought).

I think it cost me nearly 40 quid to print two copies of my dissertation 
(22k words).



David.