Green Options

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?

I know I’ve been a bit like a dog on a bone about the fact that print is not necessarily the enemy, but I think it’s important. Marketers are being hit like a locomotive with the idea that e-mail and other electronic media are green because they don’t use paper, but there is a lot more to environmental friendliness than cutting tree. Like . . . energy use.

This week, the print industry will gather in Chicago at Print 09 (September 11 - 16), one of its largest annual trade shows. There, the The Print Council will promote a new position paper titled, “Why Print Is Green.”

“Our industry is a leader in recycling, sustainability and pollution control,” says Ben Cooper, executive director of The Print Council. “In fact, we pioneered putting those concepts into widespread practice over the past three decades. But we did so quietly, to the extent that there is a lack of awareness regarding the environmentally responsible nature of print.

“Why Print Is Green” describes ten specific ways in which print is green, from the responsible products used, renewable energy sourced, increased recycling rates, to improved design and delivery methods. The report is intended to demonstrate why print media is the environmentally sound choice for communicating with the audiences they want to reach.

• Among the facts the white paper documents:
• In 2008, more than 57% of paper consumed in the U.S. was recovered for recycling, more than any material.

In today’s marketing world, the paper industry is seen as the big, bad guy — the energy hogging, landfill-clogging waste producer that needs to be replaced by cleaner, more efficient electronic media. But is this really the case? The paper industry claims that the opposite is true. It points out that electronic media are huge consumers of energy, and when you consider that the paper industry is one of the largest consumers of clean energy like wind power, the tables may actually be turned.

In a recent publication, “Pixels or Paper?”, International Paper wrote:

Our industry is one of the biggest users of renewable, low-carbon energy in the world. Sixty percent of the energy used to make paper in the U.S. comes from carbon-neutral renewable resources and is produce on site at mills. In addition, these facilities use combined heat and power (CHP) generation systems, which are 80-90% efficient. Fossil fuel use and purchased energy in this industry is steadily decreasing.

It’s a debate that’s raged in the printing and marketing community for some time. If you switch to electronic methods of communication, are you really greener than if you use print? Or by switching some portion of your print marketing to email or other e-communications, are you really helping the planet?

International Paper has produced a new brochure in its “Down to Earth” environmental series, “Pixels Vs. Paper: Are Pixels Greener Than Paper?” that addresses this question. Of course, it is written by a paper company, so the answer will not be a surprise, but the brochure does contain some interesting tidbits that marketers may want to keep in mind:

This post was originally published on Eco-Libris blog on July 20.

As part of our efforts to promote green printing, we continue to closely follow the printing industry, keep you posted with printers who have already adopted eco-friendly practices in their business and speak with them on the state of green printing, the trends, the challenges in the present and their plans for the future.

We posted already two interviews with green printers (Greg Barber and Deb Bruner) and today we are happy to have another green printer on our blog: Livio Ciciotti of Monroe Litho (Rochester, NY).

Livio Ciciotti is an Account Executive with Monroe Litho based in Rochester, NY. He is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Print Media. He has been invloved in printing since high school. Livio is also in the Marine Corps Reserve, an honor graduate from the School of Infantry he now serves with 3rd Battalion 25th Marines out of Buffalo, NY and is preparing for a deployment to Afghanistan.

I was just reading about a report on the psychographics of Hispanic teens, one of the fastest growing demographic segments—projected to reach 62% of the entire teen market in 10 years. Among other things, they are described as extroverted, outspoken, wired, and defined by culture. The top three media consumed by Hispanic youth are 1) the Internet, 2) TV and 3) radio.

In light of the barrage of data on the decline of direct mail, I’ve done a lot of writing these days in the defense of print. But the psychographics of your customer or prospect base (such as Hispanic teens) may well determine which medium (or media) you use. That could mean greening your marketing program at the same time.

I’m never a fan of reducing your use of print simply for the sake of greening. After all, electronic media have their own carbon footprints, too. They are just hidden in energy use, disposal of used electronic equipment, and so on. Comparing the carbon footprints of the two can be very complicated.

Like it or not, “green” is a relative term. If you purchase a truck that gets 18 miles per gallon, is that good or bad for the environment? If you were driving a truck that got 13 miles to the gallon, it’s good. The same applies to many marketing technologies.

It’s easy to look past traditional offset and gravitate to digital and electronic technologies because of the perception that they are greener. But the fact is, traditional offset is still a necessary component of a successful marketing program. Fortunately, as I’ve written here before, offset technologies are getting greener and marketers don’t need to feel guilty about using them.

For example, Heidelberg is currently doing the media rounds announcing that its Speedmaster XL 105 offset press (pictured above) consumes between 10–20% less energy than comparable systems. Although energy costs only account for between 2-3% of the production costs of a print job, every little bit helps.

According to Heidelberg,

Sometimes we think we have to change governments and corporations in order to see environmental change, but change is just as powerful when it happens one person at a time. And sometimes it’s easier to do. 

About a month ago, I made two posts about the environmental efforts of SunChips, a snack food company. I had become excited when I discovered, quite by accident, that one of my favorite chips was packaged by a company with a deep environmental commitment. It’s always nice when you discover something that you love anyway has a secondary environmental benefit. Makes me feel better about eating junk food. 

Yesterday, I ran into a guy who was eating a bag of them. I joked, “Hey, did you know that SunChips’ packaging is one-third compostable?”

He immediately perked up. “Really? I didn’t know that. Cool!” 

Then he added thoughtfully. “I enjoy using the environment. But I don’t know much about saving it. I drive a diesel truck.” 

More and more frequently, I’m seeing companies choose sustainability, not just as operational preference, but also as a marketing approach. They are marketing “green” or sustainability (because “green” and “sustainability” are different) as a way to connect with consumers and sell products.

Thus, when I was contacted by Don Carli, senior research fellow with the Institute for Sustainable Communications, about a three-minute video on the topic of sustainability as a marketing issue, I was intrigued. It sounded like a headline I’d write. That always gets me interested.

The video was posted on YouTube by “Three-Minute AdAge,” a daily news “show.”  What I thought was interesting about this particular video was that, while it claimed to be about marketing, it really focused on the need for sustainability, not just as a way to connect with consumers, but as a way to protect marketers’ supply chains from disruption and price spikes based on their dependence upon carbon. It was interesting how Carli tied the two together—indeed, he appeared to make the two issues inseparable.

Here are some of Carli’s comments (edited for brevity):

A Green Printer interview with Carmen Spagnola, entrepreneur and owner of m.

1. What made you want to start m?
I started m because I was a frustrated consumer.  I decided that  if I want to have access to smarter, more beautifully designed, more  responsible products and amenities for my home and family, I was going
to have to create more demand.  Markets are a bit of a chicken-and-egg  relationship.  Many retailers will tell you that they only provide  what their customers want.  That is only part of my modus operandi.
I want to showcase the possibility of a better performing future, so  much of what I sell and promote is currently considered ahead of the market.  But how will the market know what it wants if we don’t inspire it to want more?

I’ve been seeing a lot of “green calculators” around these days. I love the concept because they accomplish two goals in one swoop: 1) they encourage businesses or consumers to take more environmentally responsible actions that 2) coincidentally also happen to help the marketer’s bottom line.

The latest green calculator I saw was on my bank’s website. The bank has been trying to encourage its customers to move to online statements and bills, and the latest iteration of its efforts is an online calculator that determines how much money you can save by going paperless.

It works like this. You input the number of paper bills you receive each month and the number of paper bills you pay each month. Then it automatically generates an estimate of what environmental impact the elimination of this paper would have. In this case, I input 10 paper bills received and 10 paper bills paid.

The results?