Discovery

As part of the task set in this weeks' tutorial to interview someone to help us gather inspiration for the design challenge, Sam and myself thought we should take the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the facilities on campus to see if we could discover anything that already existed at UC that could help us create awareness about sustainable practices.

The first we thing we found absolutely blew me away because even after studying at UC for three years, I had no idea that it even existed. Introducing....

The UC Greenprint Centre

The Greenprint Centre was opened in 2011 and is the only targeted environmentally friendly green print centre in the ACT and manages to recover over 97% of all materials used.

When we poked our heads in down at the print centre we were greeted by the Operations Manager James Dumar. James was happy to answer all our questions and even agreed to let us record the conversation. We recorded the audio on a mobile phone but unfortunately the quality was really poor and definitely isn't good enough to upload on here so I'll provide a transcript of our conversation:

James Dumar, Operations Manager, UC Greenprint Centre

Sam: If we wanted to get something printed here, what are the steps we'd have to take and how would we get it done?

James: You can either register through the website UCGreenprint.com and then submit the job online either through the website or by sending an email with the job to printroom@canberra/edu.au, or you can just come up to the counter.

Sam:  What formats do we need to have our stuff in?

James: PDF

Sam: How are your products sustainable?

James: Well we print on FSC certified 100% recycled paper and we've won numerous global awards including the Deming Award three times and we are the only company to have done that. All of our machines are zero waste to landfill. All of the excess tones is recovered and used for print and we've got quite a few other initiatives that you can see on our website.

Sam: Ok, we'll check that out. If we wanted to get, let's say 50 A4 colour pages printed off, how much would that cost us?

James: It's 28 cents a page.

Rob: And that's regardless of how many colours you want printed?

James: Yes, it's a digital colour print.

Sam: So then if it's in digital does that mean it can be in RGB or does it have to be in CMYK?

James: Yes, because it's a digital print it can be in either format. It'll work itself out.

Rob: Do you advertise at all around the Uni?

James: Yes, we are in the Monitor magazine, we have a regular newsletter that goes out to the staff at UC and we have brochures that we send out to the heads of faculties, particularly in Architecture and Graphic Design so yeah, we do. 

Operations manager James Dumar and print room manager Malcolm Marshall at the UC Greenprint Centre.

 I expressed my disbelief to James that I had been studying at the university for three years and had not heard a single thing about the Greenprint Centre from any of my tutors or lecturers. James agreed and said that the centre was very underutilised by the staff and students at UC and that his emails to the various faculties usually didn't get any response.

As a Graphic Design student, we are often asked to submit high quality, printed versions of our assignments and it just seems crazy that we have all been driving all over Canberra to get high quality prints of our designs when we could have done it right there on campus instead. This is especially baffling considering that sustainability and ethics have become such a large part of the curriculum in the last couple of years so you'd think the staff would be trying to make the students aware of the existence of the UC Greenprint Centre.

The UC Greenprint Centre is owned by Ricoh, who according to James, have been dedicated to sustainable practices since the beginning. Even before it was cool. This dedication spans across all the company's  operations from manufacturing through to printing and is definitely worthy of praise, particularly its policy of Zero waste to landfill. I got this info from their website:

"The Ricoh Group defines Zero Waste to Landfill as a 100% resource recovery rate, or no waste used as landfill. Zero Waste to Landfill was achieved at its major production sites in Japan in March 2001 and at production sites outside of Japan in March 2002. Thus, the Group achieved Zero Waste to Landfill at all its major global production sites."

So there you go, on our first outing to explore what facilities are available that could potentially help increase the campus' environmental kudos we came across that gem. Who knows what else UC may have lurking about that nobody knows about.