You’ve started a green team and seven weeks later, your once ecstatic committee of cubicle warriors by day, green champions by night (a.k.a your green employees) begin to dwindle in numbers. Even the most eager employees look like they would prefer to be idling in traffic than be here listening to your green pitch.

Preston Koerner wrote a valuable article in Green Biz on how to prevent “green fatigue” and separate it from the “green noise” amongst customers in response to a recent commentary on eco-overload in the New York Times. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks back, I was writing about CO2-friendly supply chains and saw the hefty list of U.S. companies that the Environmental Defense Fund had helped switch to recycled content in a drive to reduce paper waste across the nation.

Now, paper is back under the public eye in fuller force than ever because of its significant climate change footprint.
“Paper is a tremendously resource-intensive product to produce,” explains project manager Victoria Mills, “and the decomposition of paper in landfills generates methane, a greenhouse gas with 23 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.” Read the rest of this entry »

A www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch

For all those days when you believe your green values aren’t aligned with your workplace but you can’t - or don’t want to - make the eco-entrepreneur step, here are some immediate action steps to try out at the office this Monday.

Remember: while many green teams start from humble beginnings, they can grow exponentially - pent up passion for green amongst employees can be powerful driving force. Read the rest of this entry »

Image source: it all skyrocketed with Gutenberg’s printing press…

A Green Printer dispatch.

Ever wondered how much energy and thought it took to produce that shiny brochure your marketing staff handed to you this week? And no, it’s not just the brand and visual design genius we’re talking about.

Let’s face it: making a few pieces of paper look pretty takes up some pretty hefty resources and the paper and pulp industry is there to meet our paper hungry needs (so much for the paperless office).

In fact, the OECD Environmental Outlooks calls the pulp and paper industry the single largest consumer of water and the third greatest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, right after the chemical and steel industries and the oil and gas industry.

And, that rank, as echoed by Co-op America is not set to go down anytime soon.

The Environmental Defense Fund further attests that paper use is on the rise with paper and packaging still making up one third of municipal landfill waste. And, producing all those nice brochures (or manuals or contracts or….) takes up a lot of energy. In fact,

• Producing paper uses 11.5 percent of all energy in the industrial sector.
• One third of all wood harvested in the U.S. goes into paper products.

Thus, on the bright side, paper use presents the potential for enormous environmental savings. Citigroup took up the challenge of using post-consumer waste paper and saved 43.8 billion BTU’s of energy, enough to supply 430 homes for a year.

But then, what about those cool, “a must” coloured graphs and charts on the company brochure?

More than likely, it was made using inks containing volatile organic compounds (VOCs). That’s short for those nasty major pollutants linked to the deterioration of the earth’s protective ozone layer and, consequently (some researchers suggest), to accelerating climate change.

So what are we to do?
Let’s begin with the water used to print those brochures. Waterless printers have been able to dramatically reduce water consumption. For example, a printer in Switzerland, operating one of the world’s first waterless web presses, eliminated the use of approximately 250,000 liters (about 66,000 gallons) of water in one year. That water would normally have come from a nearby lake, which is a source of drinking water for tens of thousands of people.

The invention of water-washable inks has allowed the waterless pressroom to be virtually VOC-free. Water-washable ink technology takes out the need for solvent-based press and blanket wash solutions, which typically account for a large portion of a printer’s VOC output.

So, have your cake and eat it too. We all love handing a cool looking brochure to a client. It just doesn’t need to cost the Earth.

More resources

• No piece of paper is completely environmentally invisible, even the recycled kind, so choose check out these guidelines for environmentally preferable paper by the Environmental Paper Network.
• Handy printable signs to encourage better office paper use by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
• Ever wondered where to even start to buy greener paper? The first step starts with asking the right questions and this Paper Supplier Evaluation PDF by the EDF is about as thorough as it gets.
• Recycled paper purchasing article from GreenBiz.com.

Get these brands and more, all while tracking how much CO2, trees and wastewater you’ll save with the Eco-Widget, at Green Printer.

Image source: National Geographic

A short, weekly “school of hard knocks” history of why paper supply chain management is not as easy as it looks - but can be. A Green Printer dispatch.

Deforestation hurts. Just ask Harrison Ford - he waxed his chest and demonstrated just how close forests are to his heart.

Sustainable management of forests, not simply trees or more recycling, is what Rainforest Alliance’s executive director Tensie Whelan recently advocated for in GreenBiz and she’s right: while recycling has its environmental limits, sustainably managed forests as a whole ensure the well-being of the forest ecosystem and biodiversity survival for generations to come. Read the rest of this entry »

A Junk Mail “Sculpture” a la http://antiadvertisingagency.com

A http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

We’ve come this far in our exasperation with junk mail-apalooza and now people are luring us with cold, hard cash (or the beauty of planting a tree) to get us to stop receiving virgin-forest-eating junk mail.

We’re in love with Green Dimes (thank you to Nate Burgos of Design Feast for the gread tip), which not only offers a widget that claims to track, in real time, how many:

i. trees are saved;
ii. Victoria Secret catalogues are stopped and;
iii. (tongue in cheek style) “people helped”,

but also offers a really convenient online service to cut out those annoying credit card application forms. Read the rest of this entry »

Image source | www.jiinjoo.com

An http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch.
When asked: how “green” are you, the brains behind accounting, IT and architectural firms who, kudos to them – both the closet greens or eco-warriors who proudly bear their eco-badge on their sleeve – jump up to say that they are helping their clients drive sustainability solutions.

Even lawyers are realizing their impact on their environment. No seriously, lawyers are sharp enough to know that using all that virgin paper cannot be good to the environment.

But when it comes to driving internal sustainability initiatives? Many still respond by: “we recycle”. Period. Read the rest of this entry »

Photos by Chris Jordan | “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption”

Design Goes Green - The first of a series of articles by Green Printer on the cross-section between the environment, business and the creative communications industry.

According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, used or unwanted electronics amounted to 1.9 to 2.2 million tons in 2005, with most of that ending up in landfills. We did a post earlier on the how the chemicals that seep into the soil, even decades later, can have harmful human health effects and the fact that heaps of the stuff are often left abandoned in developing countries. Read the rest of this entry »

Warning: so, as the video and Oprah’s darling du jour and guerrilla closet warrior Peter Walsh so clearly outlines, our pack-rat habits are making us chubby. They can also be a barrier to us going green. Not surprising, did you notice that your lean and toned friends also tend to have pretty darn spotless, sustainability-forward and organized homes, while your plumper friends tend to lavish in “chaotic creative” spaces. Hmmm… Read the rest of this entry »

Image Source: http://www.replate.org

We ask design guru Nate Burgos, named Fast Company’s debut “Fast 50 Champions of Innovation“, to reflect on how the Internet changed how designers ‘make connections’ and why government and ‘big business’ should care about environmental sustainability and design activism.

Our take: major organizations should take a cue from the incredibly creative and nimble ways designers (who often, historically speaking, have a pulse on how online mediums work faster than business) are using the Internet and multi-media platforms to attract highly engaged users - not to mention high web traffic rates.

Here are nine websites to watch and more on what the ever quotable Burgos said on design activism, the Internet and sustainability… Read the rest of this entry »