The True Cost of a Printed Page

The True Cost of a Printed Page

We still walk into organisations running well over a hundred printers. Not print rooms, not a reprographics department: printers, one under every other desk, a multifunction on every floor, and a cupboard of toner that nobody can quite account for.

And then you watch what they are used for. A supplier invoice arrives by email as a PDF. Someone in finance prints it. Someone scans it. The scan is emailed to the budget holder, who prints it "for their files", signs it, and sends it back, where it is scanned again for the accounts system. One document, born digital, has been turned into paper twice and back into a PDF twice, and every step has been carried out by a person who is paid to do something else.

This is not an eco-warrior post. It is an accounting one. A printed page carries two bills: the one you pay, which is larger than most people think, and the one everybody else pays, which is larger still. Both are worth adding up.

A page that started life as a PDF and ends life as a PDF has no business being paper in the middle.

Before It Reaches the Tray: Making a Sheet of Paper

A ream of A4 at 80gsm weighs about 2.5kg, so each sheet is roughly 5 grams. That sheet has been on quite a journey.

• Harvesting and haulage. Trees are felled, delimbed and loaded by heavy diesel machinery, then trucked to the mill.
• Debarking and chipping. Logs are tumbled to strip the bark and fed through chippers that reduce them to fragments a few centimetres across.
• Pulping. Most office paper uses the kraft process: chips are cooked under pressure at around 170°C in sodium hydroxide and sodium sulphide to dissolve the lignin that binds the fibres together. To be fair to the industry, the spent "black liquor" is burned to recover the chemicals and raise steam, so a modern chemical mill generates a good part of its own heat.
• Bleaching. Brown pulp becomes white through a sequence of chlorine dioxide, oxygen, hydrogen peroxide and caustic stages. The chemicals are themselves energy-intensive to manufacture, and the effluent has to be treated.
• Forming and pressing. At the headbox the "paper" is around 99% water and 1% fibre. It is spread on a moving wire, drained, and squeezed between press rolls.
• Drying. The remaining water is driven off over dozens of steam-heated cylinders. This is the single most energy-hungry step on the paper machine, commonly put at around two thirds of its thermal energy.
• Finishing and cutting. Calendering, sizing, slitting, sheeting to A4, counting into reams, wrapping, boxing and palletising.
• Wholesaling and delivery. Much of the office paper sold in the UK is imported, so add shipping, warehousing, a lorry to the wholesaler and a van to your door.

Published figures for the energy needed to make a tonne of virgin paper range from about 4MWh (electricity and steam at a modern mill) to about 10MWh (total primary energy across the supply chain). The spread is about where you draw the boundary, not a disagreement about the physics. Either way, the numbers come out like this:

The water figure is the Water Footprint Network's global average for an A4 sheet. Most of it is rain taken up by the forest rather than water drawn from a river, and the real range runs from about 2 to 30 litres depending on where the wood grew, but it gives a sense of scale. A single ream of paper carries roughly the energy needed to run a 2kW kettle for somewhere between five and twelve hours.

Hold on to that number, because in a moment it will make the printer's own electricity bill look like a rounding error.

The Printer Itself

To keep this honest we have used a real, independently reviewed life cycle assessment rather than marketing copy: Lexmark's ISO 14040/14044 study of its CX622adhe, a 40 page-per-minute A4 colour laser multifunction. It is a sensible proxy for the workhorse found on almost every office floor, and other manufacturers' machines of the same class are broadly similar. Over its assumed five year life the study models roughly 83,000 pages, about 16,600 a year or 320 a week.

• What it is made of. 27.2kg in total: 12.6kg of steel, 11.2kg of plastics (1.4kg of it not recyclable at all), plus aluminium, glass, circuit boards and wiring.
• Energy to build it. About 2,775MJ of primary energy, roughly 770kWh, before packaging, cartridges or a single sheet of paper.
• Energy to run it. 156kWh across its whole five year life, about 31kWh a year.
• Carbon to build it. 174kg CO₂e for manufacture alone.
• Carbon over its life. 660kg CO₂e including paper. Of that, the paper accounts for about 258kg, the largest single share, and cartridges and toner are the largest part of the rest.

Two things stand out. First, it takes about five times more energy to make the printer than it will ever use plugged into the wall. Second, a year's paper for that one machine, 16,600 sheets or about 83kg, carries somewhere between 330 and 830kWh of embodied energy. The printer's own electricity, at 31kWh, is the smallest line on the sheet. Switching printers off at night is fine; it is not where the problem is.

Now multiply by the estate. A hundred and fifty machines of this class represent about four tonnes of hardware, around 26 tonnes of CO₂e and some 115MWh of energy just to manufacture, and the whole lot is replaced every five years or so.

When It Breaks

Printers are a poor bet for repair. Parts are model-specific, support windows are short, and a failed formatter board or fuser on a machine past its warranty is usually the end of it. The machine becomes e-waste. The UN's Global E-waste Monitor 2024 put worldwide e-waste at 62 million tonnes in 2022, of which only 22.3% was documented as properly collected and recycled. Small equipment fares worst. The steel is recoverable; much of the mixed plastic is not, and what is not recovered is landfilled or burned.

Consumables: The Part That Never Stops

The printer is a one-off. The consumables are a subscription to waste.

• Toner. Not carbon dust, as many assume, but a fine engineered plastic powder: styrene-acrylate or polyester resin, carbon black and colour pigments, wax, charge control agents and silica flow additives, ground or chemically grown to a few microns. It is fused permanently into the paper fibres, which is part of why printed office paper is harder to recycle cleanly.
• Cartridges. Plastic housings, rollers, wiper blades and, increasingly, a chip whose main job is to refuse cartridges the manufacturer did not sell you. Figures for the oil needed to make one laser cartridge vary between about 2 and 4 litres depending on who is counting, and estimates for cartridges discarded each year in the United States alone have long run to 300 to 375 million. These are old and largely industry-sourced numbers, so treat them as an order of magnitude, but the order of magnitude is not in doubt.
• Drums and imaging units. An aluminium cylinder coated with an organic photoconductor, plus developer and charging rollers, replaced on a page count whether or not anything is wrong with it.
• Fusers. A heating element and pressure rollers, typically with fluoropolymer coatings from the same PFAS family now under regulatory scrutiny, replaced as a whole unit.
• Everything else. Transfer belts, transfer rollers, waste toner bottles, pick-up rollers, maintenance kits, and for inkjets the ink itself and the printheads. Each arrives in its own box, with its own plastic bag, by its own courier.

In the Lexmark study, cartridges and toner are the largest contributor to the printer's use-phase carbon once paper is set aside, ahead of the electricity used to run it.

The Bill You Actually Pay

This is the figure most organisations never work out, because it never arrives as a single invoice. The printer is a capital purchase, the toner is on the stationery budget, the paper is on another, the service contract sits with IT, and the electricity disappears into the building. Nobody sees the total, so here it is for that same workhorse machine, at UK business prices excluding VAT:

That is about 6.8p per page, £21.70 per week and £1,127 per year, for one machine, before anyone's time is counted. Note again where electricity sits: less than one per cent of the total.

The lightly used desk printer is worse, not better. Its fixed costs, purchase and service, do not shrink because nobody uses it, and its small cartridges have the worst cost per page in the range. Spread £300 of fixed cost over 2,000 pages a year and every page costs 15p before a single gram of toner is applied.

Scale that to an estate of 150 devices, a realistic mix of busy multifunctions and quiet desk printers, and you are looking at somewhere between £75,000 and £170,000 a year to put marks on paper. And that still leaves out the costs that never appear on any printing budget:

• IT time spent on drivers, queues, jams, firmware updates and "it says it's out of toner but it isn't".
• Confidential waste collection, because invoices carry bank details and personal data and cannot go in the recycling.
• Storage: filing cabinets, archive boxes and the floor space they occupy.
• Security. A modern multifunction is a networked computer with a hard disk holding copies of everything it has scanned, running firmware that is rarely patched, sitting on the same network as your finance system.

Back to Those Invoices

Take a finance team handling 400 supplier invoices a week through the print, scan, email, print routine. At a minimum that is two printed sheets per invoice, and multi-page invoices make it more:

• 41,600 sheets a year, about 17 boxes and 208kg of paper.
• 0.8 to 2MWh of embodied energy and around 416,000 litres of water footprint.
• About £2,800 a year in printing at 6.8p a page.
• And the big one: if the routine adds just three minutes of handling per invoice across everyone who touches it, that is 20 hours a week, more than half a full-time post, spent turning a PDF into paper and back again.

None of it adds control. The approval is no more valid on paper than it is in an accounts system with a proper audit trail; it is considerably less so, because a paper signature cannot tell you who approved what, when, and from where. HMRC accepts electronic invoices and digital records, and Making Tax Digital already requires VAT records to be kept digitally. The paper copy is a duplicate of something you are obliged to hold digitally anyway.

Fifty Years of the Paperless Office

There is a fine irony in the history. In 1959 Xerox launched the 914, the first practical plain-paper office copier, and through the 1960s it did more than any other machine to bury offices in paper. By 1975 the same company was predicting the opposite. In the 30 June 1975 issue of BusinessWeek, under the headline "The Office of the Future", George Pake, head of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, described desks equipped with screens and keyboards, linked to each other and to electronic filing, with workers calling up documents on screen rather than handling paper. The "paperless office" entered the business vocabulary.

Almost every part of that prediction came true. Every desk has a screen. Every document is created electronically, travels electronically and is stored electronically. The only part that did not come true is the part that required people to stop pressing Print.

Fifty years later, in 2026, we still find organisations printing invoices that arrived as PDFs.

GEN banned printers across its entire estate in 2015. Not reduced, not "managed": removed. And everything carried on. Invoices were approved, contracts were signed, accounts were filed, and nobody has asked for one back. What we gained was a shorter supplier list, fewer support calls, one less class of networked device to secure, and a filing system that can actually be searched.

We are not suggesting every organisation can switch off every printer tomorrow. But almost every organisation can switch off most of them, and the first step costs nothing: add up the real bill, per page, per week and per year, put it in front of whoever signs off the stationery budget, and then ask the finance team why the invoice needs to be paper at all.

The technology to stop printing has existed for fifty years. We all need to do better at using it.