Despite companies’ efforts to cut costs and be more environmentally friendly — and a higher environmental awareness in general — most folks are reluctant to change their behavior, at least when it comes to printing at work.

That’s the upshot of a recent survey of 1,000 UK office employees conducted by Kyocera and consultancy firm Loudhouse.

In the past 12 months, 40% of workers haven’t changed the amount of paper they print, according to the survey. Just 22% have reduced their paper use, and 37% are actually printing more now than they were a year ago.

The average employee prints a whopping 45 sheets a day, or about 10,000 a year. Of those, the report estimates 6,800 could be considered unnecessary, including 2,100 extra pages that get printed because employees don’t use double-sided printing.

One reason employees haven’t taken steps to curb that waste: a lack of a formal policy from their employers. Just under half (46%) of employers have “loose guidelines related to printing,” compared to just 24% that have a formal written policy.

Businesses in the UK are generating more waste paper than ever, according to a recent study by business services company Office2Office.

Despite the push to move to a paperless office, digital documents are copied onto paper an average of 11 times. In fact, increased reliance on digital docs may actually be increasing the amount of paper being used — documents that get created digitally are printed as many times as those that started out as paper.

Why? For one, many companies keep paper back-ups because of constantly changing electronic formats. Second, employees simply like using paper, and businesses may need to rely more heavily on policies and controls to curb paper use.

In fact, 85% of all stolen data is now being taken by organized crime. That’s the finding of the recently released 2010 Verizon Data Breach Investigations, a report that studied data breaches that took place over six years. The study analyzed 900 cases involving 900 million compromised records.

Other findings of the study:

• The three industries that are the biggest victims of data threat are finance, hospitality and retail
• 39% of the breaches were enabled by use of stolen logins
• 50% of breaches had some involvement from insiders
• 85% of the breaches were not considered very difficult
• Eastern Europe, East Asia and the U.S. were the sources of most of the external data breaches
• Around half of all breaches involved manipulations of user privileges
• 38% of attacks used malware
• 29% used social engineering (tricking users to give away crucial information)

The results show a big movement from earlier Symantec surveys, Even last year, the survey found that one third of all companies surveyed did not even have basic antivirus protection installed through the in-house network. This year, 73% reported an attempted cyber-attack over the past year, and 30% report that the attacks caused serious data breaches.

The survey this year found that companies are upping their spending on data protection, now spending an average of $51,000 a year — not an insignificant sum in a small business — and dedicating more It staff time to security related tasks (up to 2/3 of all time spent).

Also,  90% of companies surveyed stated that they now have a written disaster recovery plan, even if it’s an inadequate, out-of-date one.

The survey also reported that almost 25% of companies report loss of mobile equipment, including smartphones and laptops.

Overall, the survey reflects an increasing threat level that has reached from major corporations and governments to SMBs that had little awareness of the threat a few years ago. Many companies have freely collected and shared data — now they face the even more daunting task of keeping that data out of the hands of others.

That’s according to the results of the recent annual AIIM survey.  (AIIM is the Association for Information and Image Management, an industry trade group dedicated to corporate data management.)

The survey of over 750 knowledge workers showed 17% of those surveyed worked in companies putting an ECM system in place for the first time.  It also showed 17% of companies in the process of replacing their legacy ECM system with a more open system, particularly one using Microsoft’s SharePoint software.

Among the other findings:

• A majority of current ECM users stressed increased productivity and optimized business processes as reasons for expanding their investment
• New customers cited the need for controlling the chaos of paper documents, digital documents, and e-mail as key reasons for getting serious about serious data management
• Growth in at least some usage of SharePoint went form 42% of companies in 2009 to 53% in 2010, and
• Use of cloud-based document management is set to double from 6% to 12% of companies, though most companies still have doubts about the safety of cloud computing.

According to AIIM president, John Mancini, “We have seen a tipping point in information management over the last year or so. For many organizations, their only hope of coping with the deluge of generated content from within and beyond their organizations is to invest in an ECM system.”

According to a recent survey by printer manufacturer Lexmark, here are the top five printer-related concerns from US small-to-midsize businesses:

1. Cost of consumables — No surprise here. Most offices are populated with printers and multifunctionals that cost a small fortune in ink and toner to keep running. Worst of all, those costs tend to be hidden both from the employees and from management, since most businesses don’t have a clear method for centralizing and tracking those costs.

2. Cost of paper – Actually, paper prices have declined considerably since they peaked in 2007, though that decline has leveled off recently. And while paper itself is far less expensive than toner and ink on a per page basis, it is still a major expense. Some companies are making progress in reducing paper use through more digital file delivery and with two-sided printing, but truckloads of paper are still the norm for most businesses.

3. Paper jams – This perennial problem still drives office workers crazy. Though the paper transport systems of most newer printers have been improved considerably, paper still can get jammed, thanks to poor paper storage practices, among other reasons. The problem is compounded when you have printers and copiers where the paper path is hard to reach.

4. Maximizing toner and ink use – Here, the problem is often machines that inform the user that they are out of ink or toner long before they really are. One solution is buying machines that have larger capacity consumables, so the situation occurs less often. The other solution is to ignore the warming and just run the printer till it goes dry, then replace.

5. Frequent replacement of supplies – This is related to #4. Smaller printers with small-capacity replacement cartridges, are the enemy of productivity. When a machine needs new supplies, someone has to find supplies (hopefully you have some in stock), take out the old cartridge (hopefully recyclable), and insert the new one (often a slightly tricky process). All of this is an unproductive delay, and the more often it occurs, the more likelihood of having problems — like running out of supplies and having to wait for a reorder.

Our take: Most offices have far more printing devices than they need, and too many have cheap private printers on desktops. Consolidating the number of printers and replacing them with larger shared workgroup models with low costs per page and larger capacity consumables and two-sided printing will solve most of these problems.

The study included everything from smartphones and PCs to digital cameras and printers. It got responses on reliability (the ability to set up and run without major problems) and service (what happens when there is a problem). The survey asks for rankings in nine separate areas, include phone hold time and ease of configuration.

How did the various printer companies do?

Here are some of the results. Be aware that the survey was mostly about home models — not serious office workgroup models — and probably includes a large percentage of low cost ink jet models, so take it with a grain of salt:

• 7%t of users reported severe problems with their printers (almost the same as in 2008).
• Canon won top honors in this class — this has to be almost all ink jets, since Canon doesn’t really compete in the laser printer market.
• Brother showed very well, improving its ranking (the company offers both ink jet and laser models).
• Samsung slipped from second to third place, in a tie with Epson. Of course, Samsung sells only laser models, Epson only ink jet. Samsung got top ranking in ease-of-use.
• Dell improved from below-average to above-average (ink jet and laser).
• Kodak, on the other hand, slipped (ink jet only).
• HP, as it has done in previous years, ran last. That’s the case even though half of the respondents owned HP printers (laser and ink jet).

Again, a few caveats: These are mostly home machines, mostly ink jets. Those surveyed are among the most tech-savvy, so the answers are probably different than what you’d get from a less sophisticated group.

Ever wonder why spam keeps arriving in your e-mail when, by now, everyone knows not to open it?

Surely no one is stupid enough to even open cheap Viagra ads, solicitations from horny Russian temptresses, or uncanny weight-loss “silver bullets”, let alone buy anything from them, right?

Think again. We don’t have any info on Russian babes or sex aids, but a recent survey on weight loss shows how spam is a lucrative business.

The results: Over 40% of people with self-described “weight problems” have opened weight-loss spam messages. And 18.6% of people in that group have made a purchase from an e-mail solicitation about losing weight. (Astonishingly, 5% of those without weight problems also sent away for such products.) Furthermore, the survey was targeted at college students, who one might believe would be pretty savvy on the Web.

And of course, the products themselves are either useless or perhaps downright harmful. The author of the study is quoted as saying “I was shocked. I didn’t expect so many people to be buying this stuff.”

Those are extraordinary numbers. Now, it’s clear that no one reads 40% of their spam or orders 18.6% of all offered products, but even one purchase a year from 18.6% of a population make this a far more effective marketing tool than direct mail or Internet ads –- especially when you consider the low cost.

The survey appears in a recent issue of the Southern Medical Journal. The sample size is pretty small (200 respondents) and as a result, the percentages are not very trustworthy. But the fact that any significant sampling of students could fall for the lure of spam mail says a lot. The low cost of spamming means that even a tiny response rate can be possible –- and that keeps spam a growth industry.

Knowing how much it costs in the first place.

But it seems most companies don’t know how to calculate how they’ve spent on ink/toner, printers and maintenance. That could be one reason a lot of companies haven’t done a whole lot to control those costs.

More than two-thirds of companies don’t know how much their printing costs, according to a survey of 260 businesses by Ricoh.

Specifically, 39% said they have problems measuring the amount spent on ink and toner, while 30% were unaware of the cost of maintenance and lost productivity due to downtime.

Charles Moloney, associate director of marketing at Ricoh, recommends companies buy equipment, maintenance contracts and consumables from the same supplier, to make costs easier to track.

More than half of office employees describe color printing as a “luxury,” according to a recent survey by Xerox.

When asked why they don’t print in color, 35% say it’s because of the cost to the company, and 82% said they’d print more color pages if it cost the same as black-and-white.

That sounds like good news for those in charge of controlling printing costs – but not when you consider the tangible ROI of some color printing. Says the Xerox report:

• Color ink helps increase sales by 80%, and
• Color documents hold readers’ attention spans 82% longer than B&W pages.

Xerox’s solution: (what else?) is to buy the company’s new ColorQube solid ink printer multifunctionals, which bring the costs of color down closer to what you’re used to paying for black-and-white.

But whether you buy Xerox equipment or not, think of training employees to understand which document (internal memos, drafts, spreadsheets) don’t need color (pages where it’ s really is a luxury) and which documents really benefit from color. And it’s not just glossy marketing materials; for example, more and more, industries are expecting at least color highlights in contract proposals and invoices.

The dividing line may seem obvious to you, but the expectations for color and the understanding of where it might make a competitive advantage are shifting fast. Monitor your competitors: if they are using color and you are not, they may be getting a leg up.