Green Printer Blog

A www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

Let’s kill the business card, the paper one that is.

Why do we need it anyways? It does that hideous bent corner thing when you take out of your wallet (excuse us “Mr. That’s-why-I-get-my-cards-lamented”, you are an exception), the VP of Financial Genius gets tossed next to the Hatha yoga instructor and besides, that font you chose, with painstaking care, is ugly anyways. Read the rest of this entry »

Image source: http://timblair.net | Lights out for Sydney, Australia 2007

An http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

Earth Hour is tonight, March 29th from 8 to 9 pm. The idea is to turn off the lights as a symbolic gesture that us citizens, business owners, uber-corporations (hello, Google’s black screen, hello McDonalds in Toronto saving 10 000 kilowatt hours) local governments and non-profit groups are taking climate change seriously.

Despite gripes that Earth Hour falls on the NCAA basketball regional, it’s lights out for over 23 major cities worldwide like Toronto and Bangkok. 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 »

Image source: www.inhabitat.com

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.

Today, I caught the “story of stuff“: a 20-minute, fast-paced look at the dark underbelly of our consumption patterns. The clip exposes the links between a host of environmental and social issues while showing you the real cost of that $5 radio (metals from South Africa, 14 years olds from the Congo dropping out of school to work in factories…). Read the rest of this entry »

Image Source: World Wildlife Federation - caption “15 km squared of rain forest disappears every minute”

A Design Goes Green Series by www.greenprinteronline.com.

Kevin Thompson of Rising Phoenix Design shares easy tips to green your advertising and marketing material in 2008.

Less is more.
If you’re smart, you can say a lot with very little. Thompson swears by low ink coverage for all Rising Phoenix Design printed pieces to create the sexy white space that you saw the big name ad firms use in their 2007 marketing material (the “Dear Ketel One Drinker. Can you find the subliminal message in this advertisement?” Followed by two-thirds of a page of white space ring a bell?) Read the rest of this entry »

Image source: akamaitech.net
Through innovation in their paper and ink use and operational changes, Xerox reduced its greenhouse gas emissions 18 percent below 2002 levels. The move saved the company $18 million dollars and spurred a new, more stringent goal of driving down emissions 25 percent below that 2002 baseline. Printing green has gone corporate mainstream.

(Image source: responsiblechina.com (c) 2007)

This is cool. Here’s what we tree huggers at Green Printer thought when we heard about the new Kindle, a kind of an iPod by Amazon that could replace your paper books, magazines and newspapers: “woo-hoo, no more trees to make books!”

Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos called the gadget, “the most important thing we’ve ever done” which got us thinking that he probably wants to protect all those Amazon rainforests just like us… Read the rest of this entry »

Video: UNEP - Amazon Deforestation in Google EarthA greenprinteronline.com dispatch.
We’ve become a letter-writing society.Sure, our 16th century relatives may have written and sent a couple of hand-written letters to their loved ones via “dove” (the bird, not the soap brand), it’s us that have set the bar for most letters - electronic ones - sent in world history.

In fact, it’s estimated that 97 billion e-mails whisk through cyberspace every day. And according to GreenPrint Technologies, despite 20th century predictions of a paperless office, Americans use enough sheets every year to build a 10-foot-high wall that would stretch from New York to Tokyo and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

(Image source: www.dmbowers.com (c) 2007).

Dispatch from the Better Business Bureau of Mainland B.C. (BBB) and Green Printer.

This past week, Wal-Mart’s “gone green” story flaunted the pages of CNN Money and scores of other major outlets. While the mammoth retailer’s CEO showed visible concern (is that a twitch we caught?) with the results of its environmental audit - which came out as a ‘mixed bag’ - analysts around the world begged the question, “has green become the new black?”

Increasingly, that answer is “yes”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Toxic inks dump in Lagos, Nigeria, www.ban.org 2007

For many, printing comes across as an environmentally benign industry - just how harmful can cartridge inks and paper be? This week’s investigation from the Press & Sun Bulletin (Birmingham, New York) suggests a darker story about the negative human health effects of traditional printing industry inks. Read the rest of this entry »