A question of perception:
how green is your media?

Buyers are unlikely, of course, to be able to select a digital provider who has taken these steps if they are unaware of the need to ask about them in the first place. More worryingly, however, many would claim that they are unlikely to find one with an awareness of digital’s environmental issues even if they do ask the right questions.

“The companies with the big data centres, like Facebook and Google, are well-aware of the impacts and are doing a lot to minimise them like making server farms solar-powered,” says Clare Taylor, founder of an environmental consultancy specialising in print and related areas, Clare Taylor Consulting. “But a lot of digital specialists further down the line won’t be aware of doing their bit because awareness of this issue is not mainstream and, nowadays, everyone is so pushed that they don’t have the time to gain that knowledge.”

Two Tomorrows’ Knight agrees that most digital providers won’t realise that the services they are providing have an impact on the environment. “Quite frankly, the people who are selling the digital services are very unlikely to have a clue about the environmental issues surrounding them,” he says.

The problem, Knight explains, is one of perception. Providers and buyers are seduced into the same assumption that the consumer makes when browsing idly on their laptop or iPhone: that, not being a physical product in the same way that print is, the internet has no environmental cost.

“Electronic communications are just so much less tangible than print,” agrees Titheridge. “You can imagine trees being cut down and inks causing hazardous chemical waste, but digital is more conceptually difficult. When all you’re doing is pressing a button, it’s difficult to imagine the impact of such an easy action.”

These unfounded assumptions on both the provider and buyer’s parts, then, create a Catch 22 situation. Buyers aren’t educated about what questions to ask and providers aren’t being pushed by buyer demand to see that their take on digital’s eco-credentials might be inaccurate.

While this is certainly bad news for the environment, it also has ramifications for print’s image as a sustainable industry. Mistaken beliefs about digital’s impact not only prevent this impact from being lessened, but also result in misleading claims about digital’s superiority to print.

The most notable of these, of course, are messages from banks and utility companies that, to be more environmentally friendly, customers should switch to receiving statements and bills online rather than by post, a theory which is actually far from being conclusively proven.

“When you scratch beyond the surface, there are all sorts of factors that could potentially make digital just as impactful as print here, like whether someone prints their statement off at home and what sort of computer they’re using,” says Martyn Eustace, director of Two Sides, an organisation that, as part of its work to encourage good environmental practice within the print and paper sectors, petitions banks and utility companies to withdraw such questionable claims.

“So these claims are a bit of a greenwash,” says Eustace. “Companies want to reduce costs by not sending out physical bills and the best way you can do that is to tell customers that you’re doing it for the environment.”

The result of ignorance on the part of the digital providers and marketers is, then, not only promoting a falsely innocent image of digital, but demonising print in the process; the simple, digestible reality for the average consumer and buyer seems to be a dichotomy between problem-free electronic media and problematic print.

This, says Titheridge, is compounded by the fact that print is subject to high-profile standards such as FSC and PEFC paper certifications. “People think that if print is having to put a stamp on to say it’s okay then there obviously is a problem,” he says. “Whereas, because digital doesn’t have to do that, people think it’s probably fine.”

Ironically, then, the printing industry’s concern to regulate its environmental impact can, in its subtle influence on how the average person perceives the two media, go against it.

But not all digital providers are unaware of the potential environmental pitfalls of electronic communications or promote misleading statements about how clean they are. Gurdev Singh, managing director of direct channels at cross-media marketing provider Communisis, says his company is highly conscious of the need to assess and reduce the impact of their digital offering.

The difficulty it faces, however, is that the research and advice in this area is far from straightforward.

“We pride ourselves on being a responsible business, so when we’re buying kit like servers and laptops we always try and consider the environmental implications,” says Singh. “But it is such a shifting science; research done at one point will be contradicted a year later, so there’s inevitably a disparity between what we can do to reduce our print’s impact and what we’re doing on the digital side of things.”

“At the moment, there isn’t very good-quality information out there and only bits of the value chain are understood,” confirms Knight, who explains that any research done will be of limited scope in terms of helping a large cross-section of digital providers. “Digital has a more complex supply chain than print because it has more variables, such as the device the end-user owns. So digital providers have difficulty and should be careful about taking research results and extrapolating them to their specific scenario.”

People like Singh, then, are in a stalemate situation. While aware that Communisis’ digital services have an impact, he hasn’t the information to calculate this. “What we’re not prepared to do is go out there with pseudo science or claims about how we are calculating and reducing our impact that aren’t correct,” he says. “So we can’t help tackle the void that exists in providers’ and buyers’ knowledge either. And so people just go on assuming no news is good news.”

So who should be working to educate the digital communications industry and their e-communications buyers about these issues? According to Communisis, what is needed is more concrete research and advice on the practical steps that providers might take to be greener. This is scientific progress that can only be made, some would argue, if incentivised by large research and governmental bodies.

Indeed, such high-profile impetuous would also tackle the first and most pressing hurdle on the road to making e-communications greener: widespread ignorance among providers that there is even an unaddressed problem.

What is needed along with continued research, says Titheridge, is greater emphasis from those media and governmental outlets capable of reaching digital providers, on how assessing environmental impact will always be much more complex than relying on what seems to be the most immediate, tangible reality.

“I think what’s needed is the clear message that you’ve always got to really investigate these things,” he says. “It’s no different for the print industry. I remember when the whole environmental thing kicked off and everyone was using recycled paper, so my bosses were coming to me saying you must use recycled paper too. And then actually when we investigated it, we discovered that it was better to use sustainably sourced paper.”

But some would say that such awareness-raising among electronic communications providers may only go so far. Why, it might reasonably be asked, would digital providers go out of their way to start telling a positive PR story about how they are reducing their impacts when the story they are currently telling, that digital has no impact, looks even better?

The answer of course is: if buyers realised the inaccuracy of perceiving digital as ‘clean’. And so the importance of buyers asking questions and applying pressure to electronic communications providers to change their ways is clear.

Mark Cruise, head of print management at BSkyB would add that pressure also needs to come from lower down the supply chain. “I think ultimately any change has to be consumer led,” he says, “I don’t know whose job it is to push it to the consumer, but they are the ones who will influence buying decisions.”

Which begs the question of, if no one is sure who exactly should be taking the initiative to publicise the environmental pitfalls of digital, should the print industry get involved? With a vested interest in making sure that they are not losing out to the black and white ‘digital equals good, print equals bad’ dichotomy, and a knowledge of the communications industry more generally, Matthew Parker, director of print buying consultancy Print & Procurement, would argue ‘yes’.