Green Options

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 [...]

Coffee grounds are beginning to seem like quite the multi-purpose substance. First we heard about the possibility of grounds being used as biodiesel, and now we’ve received word that the world’s first printer to use coffee grounds for ink is a contestant in Core 77 and Inhabitat’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition.

In a recent national press release ScrapSMART.com encouraged those gearing up for holiday parties to consider their affordable alternative to buying mass produced party favors. The company claims to offer all the party materials you need in a convenient downloadable file format or CD that customers can print from as they need.

SPRANQ creative communications has developed a new font that is good for the environment, designed to reduce the amount of printer ink used by up to 20%.

How did SPRANQ accomplish this? By developing a font style that looks a bit like you are writing with swiss cheese!

A Dutch company called SPRANQ has developed a simple yet brilliant way to save ink: the Ecofont. According to the its creators, the font saves up to 20 percent of the ink normally used in printing.

Computers crash, memories fail, back-ups are inevitable, your iPhone may not recall your accountant’s email. Now, I am not saying that there is no need for things like eCards or bzCards, but that they cannot unilaterally replace the paper card. In fact, our little ‘paper connectors’ become a craved luxuries in our electronic worlds

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

A number of manufacturers are working on natural (non-dyed) paper impregnated with seeds. The idea is that if you plant items made of these papers flowers or trees will grow.

Bloomin’ Promotions and Seed Cards are two manufactures doing this type of thing.

I really don’t know what to make of this idea.

If properly used I am sure they would be a great learning tool, perhaps in an educational setting - write a letter to the planet, plant the letter in the school yard and see it live - that type of thing.

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

It is September and in the promotional products industry that means it is time to start talking about holiday cards.

Most companies find holiday cards a great way to show appreciation to their best clients or to send a special thank you to their employees.

Most Ecopreneurists will likely say skip the card, save a tree and send email instead. The problem is that a lot of clients expect cards.

So what to do?

Earlier this week, I talked about printing with recycled paper and how the decision on which stock to select goes beyond merely “recycled” to include other factors, including the percentage of postconsumer waste content and whether or not the paper is elemental chlorine-free.

Printing with recycled paper ought to be a no-brainer. Not only do you save trees, but according to Friends of the Earth, the production process used to create recycled paper uses up to 70% less energy than for virgin pulp. It also requires fewer chemicals.

Some marketers sniff at recycled paper, however, because it’s not quite as bright as virgin stock. Yet, one could make the argument that the positive social image associated with recycling can easily offset any loss in brightness—if that was ever really important at all.

More Reasons to Use Recycled

If the points above aren’t enough to overcome the “brightness” appeal, here are just a few more reasons to favored recycled stock. This list is compliments of Barefoot Press of Raleigh, NC.

First off, I want to say that, as someone who has been an analyst in the commercial printing industry for fifteen years, I’m thrilled to be part of The Inspired Economist. For years, printing has been seen as part of the problem, so the ability to get in on the ground floor of a blog on environmental sustainability and talk about how printing can become part of the “greening” of corporate culture is quite a thrill.

Using print—a medium that contributes to solid waste and may appear to be part of the problem—to “green” a company’s document management and marketing culture seems nonintuitive. It is perhaps for this very reason that I hope readers will find my posts enjoyable.

There are two points that I want to open with.

First, in marketing, electronic alternatives are often framed as the green alternative to print because they don’t require paper, ink, packaging, and physical transportation. However, there is a lot more to one’s environmental footprint than this. Take, for example, one’s carbon footprint. On this issue, electronic alternatives with their massive, 24-hour energy drain start to look less appealing.

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

GreenWare cups resemble clear plastic cups but are made from a resin derived from corn called Natureworks® PLA (polylactic acid) resin. If you are a business, festival, music event, stadium or other venue selling drinks in cups, please consider these as a alternative to petroleum based plastic cups.

These cups are 100% compostable and environmentally sustainable as PLA resin is naturally recycled in the Earth.

Other environmental benefits include:
~ 20% - 50% fewer fossil resources used than with petroleum based resins.
~ No ground water contamination because the cups break down into natural lactic acid and metabolites which are recycled into the ground.