Patent ID: 7991892

Claim:
A method for selecting a printer from a plurality of printers to minimize a carbon footprint of a print operation, the method comprising: determining via a programmable processor a resource consumption amount and an energy consumption amount of each of a plurality of network environment printers with respect to an invoked print operation; listing a subset plurality of the printers that have determined resource consumption amounts not exceeding a resource amount threshold and that have weighted determined energy consumption amounts not exceeding an energy amount threshold; combining the determined resource consumption amounts and the determined energy consumption amounts of the listed subset plurality of the printers into combined amounts; automatically choosing a printer with a lowest of the combined amounts as a destination printer for the invoked print operation; and wherein the determining the energy consumption amount of each of the printers comprises determining the energy consumption amounts from energy profiles of each of the printers as a function of a print operation page size requested for printing of the invoked print operation, wherein the energy profiles may vary non-linearly based on the print operation page size.