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:

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.

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?

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 this short video Craig from Independent Printing shows off their new bamboo blend print stock.

[Handmade business cards by Lizerati. Used with permission.]

We’ve had crafty business on the brain this week! On Sunday, Julie wrote about salvaged setups for outdoor shows, and yesterday, I posted about recovering after a long day of vending. So what about your promotional materials? It’s important to have some sort of take-away at your booth so folks who don’t have cash on hand can find you later. Here are a few eco-friendly resources for making or printing your business cards!

This post was originally posted on Eco-Libris blog on March 18.

We’re constantly talking about the need of the book industry to increase its efforts to lower its environmental impacts and adopt greener practices. At the same time, we try to do a reality check every couple of months and learn from those who actually print the books how things are doing.

Last January we had an interview with Greg Barber of Greg Barber Company, who shared with us insights on what it means to be a green printer. Today we have the pleasure to host another experienced green printer, Deb Bruner of Pinnacle Press.

Deb Bruner serves in Pinnacle Press as director of book publishing and eco-friendly initiatives. She has more than 25 years experience in the publishing, paper and printing industries. Prior to Pinnacle, Bruner worked as the director of book publishing papers for New Leaf Paper, the environmentally friendly paper merchant, where she managed mill relationships and developed sales opportunities.

As you can see, Bruner has a vast experience with a specific focus on green printing, so we decided there’s no better person to get our current update from. We also wanted to learn more about Pinnacle Press of St. Louis, MO, which is well-known for its quality services and commitment to the environment.

We hope you will enjoy this opportunity to learn what’s going on in one of the major fronts of the book industry - the printing machines.

Hello, Deb. Could you describe please Pinnacle’s efforts to go green?

Pinnacle Press was the first book component printer to start stocking a recycled sheet for book jackets at price parity with virgin stock. We started doing this back around 2002 or 2003 due to customer demand from the university press community; presses like Cornell University Press wanted a recycled coated sheet for book jackets to help them meet their recycled paper commitments to Green Press Initiative.

In these turbulent economic times, there’s two major approaches that can happen: tighten everything down and hope you survive, or create new opportunities, within your business or in a whole new one.

For those that choose the second option, there are several interesting paths to follow, and many places to find ideas to inspire which one you choose. Springwise is my favorite, with thousands of trend spotters around the world, writing brief, engaging pieces on companies expanding what’s possible. For quick [...]

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of Proforma Simonetta Freelance, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy (see proformagreen.com). John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

Independent Printing was displaying eco-friendly flash drive folders at the Proforma convention in Dallas last week.

As we have written before about Independent Printing, they are a great resource for Forest Stewardship Council certified [...]