Green Options

I’ve written a lot in these posts about print vs. electronic media and the sustainability issues faced by both (yes, both! electronic media aren’t as green as people think). Now you can investigate more deeply for yourself. On November 17, Target Marketing and Printing Impressions will offer a webinar titled “Paper or Electronic? The Impact of Choices.”

Speakers will be:

Don Carli
Senior Research Fellow
Institute for Sustainable Communications

Brian Kozlowski
Director, Sustainable Development
NewPage Corp.

This free webinar will discuss the tools, processes, and success stories that exist to help direct marketers determine not only which media best fit the job at hand but also how to improve the carbon footprint of all channels.

Topics to be discussed include:

What is the current state of the consumer on the issue of green products? Grail Research, which recently conducted a survey of 500 consumers on issues related to the purchase of green products, refers to green as mainstream and sticky, but not deep.

According to the study, “The Green Revolution” (September 2009),

84% of consumers say that either some or most of the products they purchase are green (mainstream)
Only 1% say that they used to buy green products but no longer do (sticky)
Only 8% of consumers make green the primary factor in their purchase decisions (not deep)

The number one reason people are deterred from buying green products? They are perceived as being too expensive, with 69% of respondents giving this answer. Forty percent view green products as not offering enough variety and choice.

What is the difference between the moderately interested (light green consumers) and the very committed (dark green consumers)?

Did you notice something different on the back pages of The Order of the Phoenix? If you live in the Canadian market, you might. The fifth book in the Harry Potter series has something unusual on its back pages. It’s an environmental audit.

The audit, produced using New Leaf Paper’s Eco Audit Calculator, uses New Leaf EcoBook paper, which uses 100% postconsumer waste. This is something new in the book market, which is normally so sensitive to price.

While the paper does cost more than virgin, these costs are offset by the extreme environmental benefits of switching to paper made with 100% postconsumer fiber. Because virgin paper costs less than recycled papers, the book industry has traditionally gone almost exclusively with virgin stocks. But Scholastic decided to make an environmental statement — a big one.

According to the audit, on the 950,000 print run, this simple switch resulted in a savings of 29,600 trees, 12.4 million gallons of water, 20,300 BTUs of energy, 1.4 million pounds of solid waste, and 2.7 million pounds of greenhouse gases. That’s more than just a drop in the bucket.

Companies marketing green products and, in particular, promoting their green energy initiatives are using words like “energy conservation” and “green energy,” but what effect has this had on consumers? Do they care? Do they even understand what these terms mean?
EcoAlign, a strategic marketing agency focused on energy and the environment, decided to find out. In September, it conducted 1,000 interviews, comparing against a similar survey conducted in September 2007. The sample was balanced to match the U.S. population by age, gender, region and ethnicity.
The results? Green Align found that consumers generally have positive associations with the terms “energy efficiency,” “energy conservation” and “clean energy,” but their understanding of what these terms mean has remained the same or decreased since 2007.
They also have low or negative understanding about technical terms such as “demand response” (resulting in the recommendation that such terminology not be used in external marketing communications) and showed a lot of confusion about green pricing terminology such as “peak pricing,” “green pricing,” and “fuel supply pricing.”
Moreover, consumers remain confused about the definitions of basic terms. They cannot articulate the difference between energy conservation, energy efficiency and smart energy. Less than one third chose the correct definition for those terms from among a selection of definitions (multiple choices).

I’ve blogged a lot about how the printing industry is far greener than people give it credit for. The presses are more efficient. Paper often has high recycled content. Marketing strategies emphasize smart use of data over volume production. There are many ways that printing is green — greener, many argue, than electronic media. But what about individual printers? To what extent are they consciously pursuing a green strategy? It can be a significant investment, after all. Are their customers making it worth their while?

Last year, the commercial printing industry information portal What They Think released a report on the status of green in the printing industry. This month, in Printing Continues to Go Green, WTT updated the report with fresh data, comparing the numbers year over year.

In the June 2009 survey, WTT researchers found the following year-over-year changes:

Printers are far more likely to identify themselves in their marketing and promotional materials as environmentally sensitive businesses — 33%, up from 26% last year
They are slightly more likely to justify new equipment purchases because of their more favorable environmental impact — 22%, up from 20%
They are more likely to have special “green” certifications from independent organizations (Forest Stewardship Council, Green Seal) — 22%, up from 15%
They are slightly more likely to say that promoting their green efforts helps their business image — 39%, up from 35%.

But it’s not all good news. Commercial printers don’t see a lot of customer gratitude for their efforts. In the June 2009 survey, they were noticeably less likely to say that it was essential to their customers and more likely to say that it was a major expense without a major business benefit. Only 2% said it was critically important to their customers.

This is a real problem. Why?

An increasing number of marketers are turning to toner- or inkjet-based printing in order to green their print marketing programs. It’s not that offset presses are inherently ungreen. On the contrary, printing as a whole is a whole lot greener than many people give it credit for. But digital printing has some compelling green benefits.

Lower start-up waste
Smaller, more targeted production volumes
Presses with a higher percentage of recycled (or recyclable) parts
Lower [...]

Many marketers are pushing their customers toward electronic statements, e-newsletters, bills, and transactional statements as a “green” move, but in reality, it has more to do with economics. It’s cheaper for businesses to send electronic communications than print. But while pushing e-communications as greener, has anyone bothered to ask what customers how they feel about it?

InfoPrint Solutions Company did. A joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, InfoPrint conducted a a survey that found three out of four respondents would consider opting for traditional mail delivery if they were informed it had less of a negative environmental impact than email.

In addition, 50% of consumers indicated that they still prefer to receive marketing information about new products or services via traditional mail rather than email. Only 44% would rather receive marketing via email.

Do preferences convert into action? Yes! Not only do customers prefer print mail, but they are more likely to open it, even if both communications come from a bank.

Did you know that copiers consume the most energy of all types of office equipment? That they consume power even when they are sitting idle? Simply by switching to a more energy-efficient type of printer, you can take a chunk out of your carbon emissions.

In addition to their cost efficiency, this is one reason that many businesses are looking at inkjet. Increasingly, even office-style machines have terrific image quality (commercial-quality inkjet presses are now as high as 1200 dpi) and they produce little or not heat. That means low energy use.

A very funny promotional video from RISO explains it well. Grandma may like her color copies because they are “nice and toasty,” but this is because of the heat generated by the machine and, consequently, their high energy consumption. Hence the line, “You could cook a turkey in there!” (I’ll leave the animation to your imagination).

Three days ago, I blogged about the EPA’s Green Power Partners site, which lists the top green power users in the country. That post got more traffic in a day than my posts normally get in a month. That was very exciting for me. People clearly care about this issue. At least for me, when all things are equal a company’s commitment to environmental sustainability can make the difference between one product choice and another. I hope it does for others, too.

Let me build on that by saying that there is even more good news than this. Did you notice that the Green Power Partners site also has Top 20 lists by category? These include college & university, local government, retail, on-site, and printers.

What’s interesting here is printers. This is a highly unglamorous category. Why would the EPA care about commercial printing and packaging companies? For the same reasons that anyone interested in environmental sustainability should care about them.

1. Printing is the third largest manufacturing industry in the country

2. Printing is a very aggressive with environmental sustainability, including its use of green power.

Put these together and you have the third largest manufacturing industry making a major move to sustainability. When not just individual companies but an entire industry embraces green technologies and processes, it makes a real difference. That’s exciting!

Yet, where’s all the buzz? E-media! With its 24-hour-a day, 7-days-a-week power usage, its ubiquitous energy-using devices from desktop computers to laptops to servers to cellphones, PDAs, and every other mobile device that now blanket the planet and drain the power grid. Meanwhile, because printing uses — dare I say the word — paper, it’s the bad guy?

Have you ever been curious about the companies that use the most green power? Or that are 100% powered by wind? Such a list might change the way you think about making purchases, wouldn’t it?

Would it change the way you purchase soft drinks? Yogurt products? Financial services? If you knew that one company used 100% green power to manufacture, market, and sell its products, would it make you more inclined to purchase from it rather than another company? I don’t know about you, but it would me.

Such a list is compiled by the EPA’s Green Power Partnership.

But it’s not just wind power. The Green Power Partnership list compiles the list of top purchasers of green energy — period — which includes biomass, solar, and even geothermal, as well as wind.

Let’s take a look at the Top 10 green power users. But before I do, I want to warn you that there is a shocker in here. One of them is a paper company. Yes, the big, bad paper industry is represented among the top 10 users of green power in the country!

Here is a list of the top 10 green energy purchasers, the energy sources they use, and the percentage of their annual energy use that is purchased from green sources.