Zachary Shaw
Copy Editor  

Lewis and Clark has made a change this semester dealing with on campus printing. The program called, PaperCut, will cost students who in effect print in large portions of their materials at school.

PaperCut is a printing program that allows the domain user to set printing allowances and quotes, track print volume, and control printing output on all computers with the software.

This change has been coming for sometime however. L&C has been researching various ways to lower the total amount of pages printed each year.

Prior to this year, L&C’s total pages printed have grown to accumulate over 1.2 million annually.

“Not only would we like to reduce the use of paper, but things like toner, printer replacement, and other waste can be reduced as well – all of these efforts reduce our carbon footprint and improve sustainable practices,” Chief Information Officer, Mark Tuck said.

While PaperCut is still in it’s early stages at L&C, the school has high hopes for the program based off other colleges positive results.

Other institutions have seen print volume shrink by 20 percent in the first year of being implemented. Calculations predict that if L&C reduces it’s print volume by the same amount that over 240,000 pages will have been saved by the end of the academic year, according to Tuck.

The current settings determined by L&C offers a budget of $25 a semester to each student for printing purposes.

Every page printed deducts 10 cents from the $25 budget. If a student prints more than 250 pages printed in a single semester, each page printed after is a 10 cent charge to the student’s account.

Currently, over 4,400 students attend on campus classes, only 30 have so far exceeded the 250 page budget.

“I don’t really care, and most people don’t seem to care about this new PaperCut program. I don’t see anyone up in arms about the printing limit; it doesn’t affect anyone it feels like,” undecided major, Quentin Sawyers said.

L&C is noticing that by the spread of word and printer use, students are becoming aware of PaperCut.

In turn the program has been making students more shy towards what and how much they need to print. With this being said, L&C is not trying to impede student’s use of resources to accomplish tasks.

“In the meantime, we do not want to prevent students from being able to complete the work they need to do to succeed,” Tuck said.

Tuck is welcoming of suggestions on PaperCut and it’s implementation at L&C. He can be reached at mtuck@lc.edu.

 

Contact Zach at zshaw@lc.edu