The weekly Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
How could any company, large or small, possibly be so stupid as to come up with a National No Print Day? And yet that is what Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc., recently planned to do. Their idea drew such opprobrium from the printing industry that they wisely withdrew it.
But this idiotic idea has actually done the printing industry a favour. It has demonstrated just how little people really think about print, and how easily it is taken for granted. People don’t at all appreciate that print is print, whether it comes out of a desktop printer or a high speed digital press. They don’t recognise or understand the technology continuum. They are mistakenly clutching electronic media in a loving embrace because they believe it produces no waste. This is also idiotic.
Because they take it for granted, people often forget that print plays an important social and economic, even political role. Print isn’t just about saving wasted sheets from a desktop printer. It has numerous roles, such as to protect foods from contamination, or to inform consumers as to how many pills to pop before bedtime. Print is the only communications medium that is wholly sustainable and that stores carbon rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. The energy used to produce print is more than exceeded by the energy required to store gazillions of documents online, plus their backups, pirated versions, archived copies and disaster recover iterations.
Toshiba’s niaive gaff points to a problem of ignorance on both sides of the equation. Consumers take print for granted and don’t begin to think about its manufacture, disposal or sustainability. Most printing companies are too inward looking to understand that explaining their craft or why it is not as polluting as it’s painted is in their long term interests. All of us, printing industry associations, lobbyists, printers, buyers and trade journalists need to be looking outwards to print markets and communicating upstream to brand owners and end users.
The message is simple: print media can help protect the planet because it is sustainable. The whys and wherefores of this simple statement are complex, but they come down to that basic premise. The same cannot be said of any other media because all other media consume energy during use and do not store carbon.
Toshiba claimed that our industry has failed “to make the link between printing waste and its negative impacts on our landfills, natural resources and the environment.” We claim that idiocy is best left in its box, unwrapped, unacknowledged and understood for what it is.
– Laurel Brunner
This blog is yours to use if you want, as long as you fully credit the Verdigris supporters who make it possible: Agfa Graphics (www.agfa.com), Canon Europe (www.canon-europe.com), Digital Dots (www.digitaldots.org), drupa (www.drupa.com), EFI (www.efi.com), EcoPrint (www.ecoprintshow.com), Fespa (www.fespa.com), HP (www.hp.com), Pragati Offset (www.pragati.com), Ricoh (www.ricoh.com), Splash PR (www.splashpr.co.uk), Unity Publishing (http://unity-publishing.co.uk) and Xeikon (www.xeikon.com).