Originally installed in 1998 Eartha had become faded and the images delaminated, causing DeLorme to look for a firm that could help facelift the giant globe.

"We’d been working with Fedex Office for a while on other printing projects, including our sales collateral," said DeLorme director of marketing Kim Stiver. "Our account representative said Fedex Office could help us redo the panels on Eartha with new printing technology that could prevent peeling and stand up to UV rays."

Fedex Office used its combined printing and logistics experience to enable printing, delivery and installation of the restored panels to be carried out in stages, reducing the disruption to the client.

It was printed at Fedex Office’s Charlestown Massachusetts centralised production facility, one of 19 across the US. In total 792 panels, covering 5,400sq ft (540m2), were produced. It took 50 hours to print on an Agfa Jeti 3020 Titan UV-cured flatbed printer and 20 hours to cut on a Zünd G3 cutter. The material used was Coroplast Coro-paque Smooth, a lightweight twin wall co-polymer polypropylene.

Printing direct to substrate and applying a UV clear coat resulted in a more robust replacement that won’t delaminate and will withstand prolonged exposure to sunlight in DeLorme’s glass atrium entrance without fading.

A labelling system was developed to enable each panel to be identified by longitude and latitude. The panels were supplied in five shipments over 60 days at the end of 2012.

Fedex Office is nearing the end of an 18 month programme to refresh its wide-format production with 15 Agfa Jeti Titan printers being installed across its network, all sites have small format colour and black & white digital and wide-format digital printing, with a number of larger sites operating industrial wide-format equipment. The firm claims to have the largest sign & digital capacity print capacity in the US.