Green Printer Blog

A demonstration outside the Heavy Oil Conference in Calgary, Alberta drawing attention to the $2 billion dollar subsidy to the oil industry in Alberta for the Carbon Sequestration program.

By Contributing Writer Melissa Chungfat | Part of Green Printer’s ‘Design Goes Green’ dispatch.

Thanks to blogs, websites, Facebook, and the ever-growing list of social media tools, people have the ability and power to educate themselves about anything they please. It is harder for companies to get away with lies about their products and misleading messages. People can easily look up “greenwashing” or “what is an organic product?” in a search engine and in a matter of seconds, they have a list of resources that cuts through the PR.

So how can companies who are taking sincere environmental initiatives market themselves credibly? Read the rest of this entry »

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.

By Contributing Writer Melissa Chungfat.

Every day we hear about companies going under and pub meals having more value than bank stocks. At at time when profits are low across the nation, some company executives think that now is not the time to implement environmental initiatives. So why did companies committed to sustainability in 2008 perform better that those that didn’t?

Management consulting firm A.T. Kearney did a study comparing the performances of  99 companies with strong commitments to sustainability against industry averages from May to November 2008. Companies that leaned towards green outperformed industry averages by 15% over the six months in 16 of the 18 industries. Read the rest of this entry »

The green we need

A www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

A post by contributing writer Melissa Chungfat. 

When Barack Obama delivered his speech on November 4, 2008, he mentioned the challenges of a planet in peril and the worst financial crisis in a century. In the spirit of collaboration, he called upon all Americans to “join in the work of remaking this nation.”

 You can now check out the Clean Tech for Obama website. Cleantech and Green Business for Obama (CT4-O) is a self organized, volunteer based constituency group supporting the Obama campaign. 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 »

A greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

Victoria’s Secret’s executives never expected this story to skyrocket from the underground level of blogs and hack basements to full page ad coverage of the likes of the New York Times. And, we didn’t even get to the part of Victoria’s Secret garnering a legal (and reputation) bill longer than Gisele Bundchen’s legs but there you have it: a case study that blogs have power and consumers are watching your every (un)green move.

Environmental activists are getting more sophisticated and more entrenched into the corporate boardroom than ever before, recognizing even how corporations manipulate Google to manage their billion dollar reputation online.
Read the rest of this entry »

A greenprinteronline.com dispatch - I once asked a city-based TV editor how he chooses the news stories from all the PR “flack” and “noise” he receives on a per hour basis (I counted about 43 emails an hour in his inbox). His response? “When I go home and my son asks, ‘Dad, what happened in the news today’? I take three seconds and usually, the most striking stories of the day come to mind. Today, it’ll be the story of two feet separated at the roadside and a helicopter that saved a 68-year old adrenaline junkie grandmother from hiking the local mountains.”

The point is, blog posts are first and foremost news (and “how-to” guides and lists…). And, with our 0.025 second internet attention span, blog posts need to be even faster and more captivating than print news. Aside from the blogging credibility guide, here are three tips to get you more traffic:

1. Share a CO2 calculator with your blog readers. Here’s hidden gem in the green blogosphere that’ll no doubt get your readers a little giddy if not incredibly interested to “interact” with your blog (that’s want you want).

Share the code of this CO2 blog calculator with your readers (who, I bet, are bloggers too) and win points. I bet you’ll get referrals on Stumbleupon too. By the way, Stumbleupon can be better than Digg for getting you traffic. Read the rest of this entry »

We are excited to announce that Green Printer was a finalist in the first annual E.F. Schumacher Award for BC’s Greenest Business. The award was established by the BC Green Party to identify and applaud businesses that make environmental leadership paramount to their practices.

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Dispatch from greenprinteronline.com.

Check this: more than 30% of all the trees that are logged go to make paper. That’s a lot of energy to kill all our poor, little green friends: in fact, deforestation contributes between 20% and 25% of all carbon pollution, which, in turn, accelerates global warming. And yes, we’ve heard it before: recycle, recycle, recycle. But does it work? Yes, but…. according to the RFU, most of us still don’t do it as much as we’d like to.

In Canada, we recovered only 44% of all paper products used and over 90% of all office paper is still made from virgin fibres. Ouch, that hurts the feelings of treehuggers like us. Here are seven, easy office tips to save trees and cut down carbon emissions:

1. It’s what your mother always told you: Frugal is the new chic. When making copies, set your machine to use both sides of paper and cut your consumption by 50%.

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Paper Mills Along China’s Second Largest Freshwater Lake Closed to Avoid Pollution

From greenprinteronline.com

Over a 100 paper mills located along Dongting Lake, China’s second largest freshwater lake, were ordered to close after they failed to reduce pollution as promised.

The mills discharge chemical-laden waste into the lake, and Jiang Yimin, director of Hunan Provincial Bureau of Environmental Protection, was concerned that the mills were unable to control pollution.

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