The honest way to calculate the paper waste percentage

Commentary by Lasse Krogell, Nopa

Some time ago a former colleague of mine, now working in the print material business, called me to discuss what is the correct way to calculate paper waste in the printing business. The “old way” is to compare the wastepaper to the total amount of paper used for a job. If you have a print order of 50.000 revolutions or sheets and to get these 50.000 good copies you must print 60.000 revolutions or sheets. So, 10.000 is waste. Your paper waste percentage is then 16,7 %.

My friend was visiting his customer and the customer calculated the waste as described above. But I think it was already some 30 years ago that we changed the way we calculated the waste percentage, and my friend remembered the way we did it. That is what I call “the honest way”. You get paid for 50.000 so why not compare your waste to the amount you get paid for. Then you will have a waste figure of 20,0 %. Doesn’t that hurt more than 16,7 %?

In my example the difference does not seem so big, but if we think of a small run on a web press, say an order of 8.000 revolutions and you spend 3.000 on waste. Then the old way gives you 27,3 % and the honest way 37,5 %. Off course it is nicer to say to your boss that it was a little bit complicated job, and the waste was 27,3 % instead of saying it was 37,5 %.

I have not made any questionary of which way most printers calculate the waste, but I am quite sure that the old way, based on the total amount of paper is still the one in use.

I also asked AI how to calculate the percentage and here is what ChatGPT answered:

To calculate the waste paper percentage in the printing industry, there are two main methods, depending on what you want to measure:

1. Waste Paper Percentage Based on the Total Amount of Paper:

Usage: This method is often used to get an overall picture of how much paper is wasted during the entire production process. Here, the total amount of paper includes both what goes into the final product and what becomes waste.

2. Waste Paper Percentage Based on the Customer’s Order:

Usage: This method focuses more on how much extra paper was needed beyond what the customer ordered and can be relevant for assessing the efficiency in fulfilling the customer’s specific order.

Which Method Should You Use?

The choice of method depends on what you want to analyze:

• To understand the overall production inefficiency , you should use the first method.
• To understand how much extra work was needed to fulfill a customer order , the second method may be more relevant.

In many cases, it can be useful to calculate both values to get a complete picture of the production process.

I warmly recommend the use of the method based on customer´s order as it illustrates much better what part of the total paper usage is paid by the customer and what part is paid by the printer. Of course, all costs for a job should be included in the price for the job, but the smaller the waste the better the profit.

The old saying is that honest and correct information is often painful, but it is much more likely that eye opening information will lead to corrective actions.