Green Printer Blog

By contributing guest author Ida Cheinman, Principal and Creative Director of Substance 151, a strategic design agency for Green Printer‘s “Design Goes Green” series.

We live in a time when “sustainability” is topping the buzzword charts and a wave of greenwashing is flooding the mainstream. We live in a time of intense competition, gloomy economic forecasts and rapidly disappearing marketing budgets, but also in a time when more and more companies and organizations strive to uphold higher environmental and social values, making the shift to the triple bottom line economic model. Sustainability and social responsibility are the forces that drive many of today’s business decisions; they also change the way organizations re-think their branding and marketing strategies. As marketers and business leaders, we are faced with the challenge of finding differentiation by creating empowering and memorable brand experiences for our audiences in the increasingly crowded sustainable marketplace.

So, What are the rules? Read the rest of this entry »

A www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

Myth no. 1: The paper production industry is low on the GHG emitter totem pole.
Not so, actually the paper and pulp industry is the third largest polluter in both Canada and the United States. The Green Press Initiative (GPI) states that one of the biggest benefits of using recycled fiber is that it emits 38 percent less GHGs. Recycled fiber also uses 44 percent less energy to produce, and conserves up to 34 mature trees for every ton replacing virgin fiber.
Read the rest of this entry »

A Green Printer dispatch.

This week, greenwash fatigued bloggers (Gawker describes it as improbable a real news item as ‘the hot dog industry going vegetarian’) and non-profit spokespersons turned a skeptical eye on a group of direct marketing companies called the Green Marketing Coalition (GMC). Corporate clients, including Microsoft, Washington Mutual and OptimaHealth, are also in on the initiative.

GMC’s goal? Altruistic enough. According to the New York Times article “Direct marketing goes green. No, really”, these marketers are joining hands and taking small, albeit very conservative, steps to make an inherently unsustainable practice (i.e. sending wads of personal junk mail) at least a little bit greener. We have already written about junk mail solutions and naughty, catalogue-sending companies before and so we were curious about what best practices the industry funded group came up with. Read the rest of this entry »

A Green Printer dispatch.

Mandy Haggith with the ‘paper mountain’ she built to show what a year’s waste looks like. Photo by Angus Bruce, The Independent.

“The paperless-society goal is a very nice and noble one,” said Arpad Horvath, an associate professor at the University of California-Berkeley who has studied the issue of replacing paper with wireless technologies. “Unfortunately, I don’t see any trace of progress toward it.” Read the rest of this entry »

A Green Printer dispatch.

According to Patricia Calkins, Xerox vice-president for Environment, Health and Safety, being smarter about paper use is a win for the environment and for the bottom line, so it is no surprise businesses would zero in on improving their performance in that area.

While long an “evangelist” for greener operations, Xerox is, at its core, a global document management company, which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies.

And so, the question that Jeff McIntire-Strasburg asked in April still hovers: “can a company that manufactures copy machines, and sells more paper than any other single brand, really walk the talk on sustainable business practices?” Read the rest of this entry »

A www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

What does a leader in business that moves us “far, fast” towards our sustainability goals look like? It’s a relevant question to our pressing need for solutions and Nicola Acutt, Ph.D. writes a “bang on” response to it.

Borrowing from a recent Al Gore speech, Accult asserts that “as people grasp the magnitude and speed of change needed to address the environmental, social and economic issues that we face, there is a growing need for leaders who take us ‘far, fast'”. Read the rest of this entry »

A Green Printer dispatch.

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. 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). Read the rest of this entry »

Image source: http://www.cubeking.com | An http://www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

The big names cannot help but pump out more sustainable paper products on an almost weekly basis. From biology college textbooks gone green to carbon friendly greeting cards, we’ve rounded up the top ten green papier goods that caught our eye.

7. So, the FSC is not perfect. But it’s a start and it speaks volumes when office supply giants like Staples start to sell what most of us want to start using already in the copy machine: post-consumer waste paper.

6. Green textbooks are challenging Penn State University‘s exam taking establishment. Talk about a YAWN generation.

5. Perfect for the green spy in your life? Xerox has got paper that erases in 24 hours.

4. From your hiking map to your grandma’s birthday letter: Chris Ryan, a publisher of outdoor recreation and guide books now buys up to 15 tons of outdated maps at a time to meet his customer’s demands from these premium quality, unique envelopes made from 100% post-consumer content.

3. Random House’s 2008 15% recycled paper policy: the one that triggered a short-term revenue decline and in the future (if the right CEO steps up to the plate) has the potential to paint the publishing world a darker shade of green.

2. Live lighter at the office by switching to 100% post-consumer waste paper and then showing off your CO2 and tree savings using Green Printer’s eco-calculator widget (we couldn’t resist a well-time “plug”!)

1. Verysupercool (yes, that is their real and uber-funky name) teams with CarbonFund.org to create the Greenest Little Greeting Card in Texas.

So, even while the mythical paperless office lures us with its green goodness, we still use and love our paper – printed on both sides, thankyouverymuch.

Save trees, time and money the eco-friendly way with our recycled paper, sustainable printing methods and eco-calculator with Green Printer – more details at http://www.greenprinteronline.com. Now, wasn’t that easy?

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 »