A question of perception:
how green is your media?
Print is commonly assumed to be less sustainable than its electronic rivals, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that, managed properly, print is in fact the greener option. Words Jenny Roper
Do you have ISO 14001? How is your paper sourced? How do you minimise your carbon footprint? Just a few of the barrage of questions that printers are increasingly faced with from print buyers quite rightly concerned to ensure their printed products are as green as possible. Jump to a meeting where email, SMS and online communications are being tendered, however, and, by contrast, there is a deafening environmental silence.
“Whenever I’ve spoken to our digital provider in the past about transactional emails and marketing, I’ve never asked a single question about the impact of these on the environment,” admits Jules Titheridge, senior customer communications manager at HSBC. “Whereas with print, I always would.”
Titheridge is certainly not in the minority, but representative of a situation where, as found in PrintWeek’s Power of Print survey, 65.9% of buyers ask environmental questions of their printer, but only 28.3% of their digital content supplier.
The fact that the survey also found that almost two-thirds of buyers and marketers thought that electronic communications were greener than print, suggests an obvious reason for why these questions remain unasked. “Buyers often just kind of assume that digital communications are naturally environmentally friendly,” says Titheridge. “There seems to be this impression that digital is perfectly clean and print isn’t.”
Of course, just as questions to printers will uncover the reality that most print outfits these days are making huge efforts to keep their environmental impact to an absolute minimum, asking more questions of electronic communications providers should in theory uncover the fact that digital is by no means ‘perfectly clean.’
“Whereas the main considerations with print are water, energy use, land use and sourcing of paper,” says Dave Knight, group director at international corporate sustainability agency Two Tomorrows, “with an electronic campaign you’ve got issues surrounding the devices being used to receive the emails; what happens when that laptop or iPhone is thrown away? There can also be ethical issues with the sourcing of the materials. You’ve also got the energy use of huge server farms powering the internet and email to consider, so the emissions of digital should really be assessed in the same way as print’s.”
And, as with printers keen to be green and respond to buyers’ environmental demands, there are certainly things that digital providers could be doing to reduce their impact, says Knight.
“When the creators of digital campaigns are sending electronic communications out, they should be trying to avoid something called content waste, which is basically superfluous bits of information that travel along with the rest of the message, wasting energy,” says Knight. “With online articles, it’s important that people accurately describe the article’s content so the user finds what they want quickly, rather than finding stuff they don’t want to read and having to do more searching. I think people underestimate the amount of energy that those simple searches expend.”
"You can imagine trees being cut down and inks causing hazardous chemical waste, but digital is more conceptually difficult."
Jules Titheridge, HSBC
