The air has been blue at Francis Towers over the weekend. Not due to the usual pre-Christmas stresses and annoyances, but because of the WWF.
I've been in a state of head-shaking disbelief since I came across its 'Save as WWF, Save a Tree' non-printing PDF format initiative on Friday.
What on earth are they thinking? The WWF has built a reputation built on meticulous examination of facts, and the skewering of weasel words spouted by some of the planet's worst environmental offenders. It is beyond my comprehension that this organisation would be so loose in its own use of language, and so irresponsible in its execution of this promotion. Misinformation doesn't come close to describing it - the uninformed everyman looking at the accompanying microsite would come away with the impression that all the wood used to make paper comes from rainforests.
This ill-thought out campaign is a body blow to all the efforts made to promote understanding about the sustainability story of print on responsibly produced paper.
If you haven't already looked at the web page, then my advice is to take a few deep breaths before doing so. Sample extract from the video on the site: "every day entire forests die for paper..." and "...a PDF file could theoretically contain as many pages as you can get from a WHOLE TREE". Worse, it then goes on to show an image of some sort of a broad-leaved oak-type tree. I'm actually surprised it didn't have an orangutan dangling from it. To put the top hat on this misinformation horror story, the final frame of the video shows an aerial view of a rainforest.
Delving further, I see that this initiative originates from the WWF in Germany. Thankfully I can see no reference to it on the WWF UK site, although it's all over the blogosphere already, of course - there's even a Facebook page that's been set up specially for it.
Can but hope that once a grown-up at head office takes a proper look at this the messaging will be tempered accordingly, and apologies issued. In the meantime we in paper and print need to make our dissatisfaction known. I've just noticed that WWF-UK chief exec David Nussbaum is a former finance director at Field Packaging - I'm sure he'd like to hear from some of his old mates in the industry.
WWF-UK
Panda House
Weyside Park
Godalming
Surrey GU7 1XR
t: 01483 426444
f: 01483 426409
