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Lexmark International, the printing solutions provider, has called on Europes public sector organisations to take actions to positively impact the 2020 efficiency and C02 targets set by the European Union (EU).

The company has called for actions such as printer device consolidation, best practice implementation and document workflow optimisation.

EUs targets include a 20 per cent reduction in emissions from IT devices, products and output by 2020.

Although these are only recommendations, some countries in Europe have already begun implementing greener IT. For example, French Prime Minister François Fillon has issued a bill, communicated to all ministries, which requires all French federal entities to cut their paper consumption in half by 2012.

In Great Britain, the government has set a target for the central government office estate to achieve carbon neutrality by 2012. The goal is to cut greenhouse emissions by 26 per cent by 2020 and at least 60 per cent by 2050.

Departments are asked to implement 18 key steps, such as reducing the overall number of printers used by an organisation and replacing them with multifunction devices, and use green printing defaults wherever possible (such as two-sided and multi-up printing).

While the energy consumption of the information technologies continues to attract headlines, Lexmarks Life-Cycle Analysis found that most of a printers carbon footprint actually comes from paper use

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Tags: Carbon Emissions, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Neutrality