AT times when residents are being urged to recycle and care for the environment, it has been revealed Bournemouth Borough Council printed and copied more than 930,000 pages in a month.

The local authority, which shares many services with Borough of Poole, printed 759,635 and copied 172,586 pages in September this year.

Figures, which have come to light through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, also show the council spent more than £321,074.88 on printers and related consumables, such as ink toner, last year.

Renting equipment and software usage set the authority back £182,433, while print charges came in at £138,641.

Despite this volume of printing and related costs, Zara Fulmer, the council’s deputy information governance manager, said compared to other authorities, the usage was “quite favourable”.

She said: “To put this into context, the net budget for the council in the current year is £127m.

“Compared to other councils, Bournemouth Borough Council’s usage of printers is quite favourable.

“We work very hard to keep the usage of printers to a minimum by encouraging staff to query if printed documents are necessary when electronic methods are available.”

Ms Fulmer also said that they “pride” themselves on various Green initiatives and strive to do “the best we can to ensure practices are adopted across all departments.”

“These figures also will take into account some services which are now joint operations with the Borough of Poole and so actually account for two departments now merged as the two authorities work towards the full merger in April.

“There are certain departments – such as legal – where documents must be printed off, specifically to do with court bundles but in this instance that is a process that the council can only adhere to while the court system has yet to be digitised.”

The council’s current contract with Canon expires in June 2019.

At present they are supplied with 120 multi-function printers.

Cllr Simon Bull, the only Green Party member on the council, said he was “staggered” by the volume of printing that had been disclosed.

“It is unacceptable to be using that much paper,” Cllr Bull said.

“We should be moving to a print on request system rather than print by default.

“Saving measures such as this should be looked at. We should not continue printing that volume of paper.”

Cllr Bull said the council should be regularly tracking the amount it prints and looking to reduce usage wherever possible.

He added: “The point is we are heading towards climate chaos.

“Small measures, like reducing the volume of printing, all add up and help to address the big problems we face. We do get an extraordinary amount of papers at committees, panels and boards, which should be done on a request only basis.”