Letters, feedback, get it off your chest: 5 August 2009

Readers have their say on last week’s news; from investing in new equipment at PacPrint through to greenwash. Why not write in and let us know your thoughts.

Re: Tax break fails to boost printing industry

We took advantage of the government investment allowance and associated tax breaks with the updating of our CTF bureau to CTP Bureau with the purchase of an Acento II S CTP with Thermal plates from the Agfa Stand at PacPrint 09. It is a major investment for us to keep being competitive in the market we sell in. It depends whether we put in for the tax break before 30 June 2009 or 31 December 2009 whether we get either a 30 per cent or 50 per cent investment allowance and looks like we will doing it by end of December.

The CTP is a great easy to use bit of gear which will generate cost savings to the printers we supply.

Rodney Stagg

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Re: Printers blinded by green spotlight: Print 21 magazine article

This was an interesting article, from an interesting perspective, I agree with the writer that solutions go beyond the "environmental accreditation" of the paper, or the basic environmental practices within a print shop. The solutions to finding a balanced set of rules that don't create "green" as a commodity go right to some problematic thinking issues that have become part of the very DNA of the print process.

I agree with Tony Duncan's argument that we don't know where our print ends up. But to simply focus on "creating effective affordable communications" does have the same effect, it creates print to be viewed as a commodity (green or not), just as potentially damaging as focusing on green issues alone.

Do I have the answer? No, but I have part of it which would be to engender a code of practice within the industry that helps with the environment. Simple, small things that all add up to contributing to a better environment for all of us include reduced use of alcohol, recycling practices from the press room/ bindery floor. These are obvious and very commonplace in almost every print manufacturing establishment in Australia, because these things either save the printer money or in some instances put money in his pocket.

What about less obvious areas that may assist with Tony's argument such as running the correct quantity of a product? Instead of supplying 725 units of a product, what happens? What does the printer do? How do they count? How do print buyers justify expenditure? Yes, they round it up to 1000. Twenty five per cent of the product was never going to get used anyway! Could a code of practice include such things as the previous example? I don't know, I could see how such would work to potentially increase the bottom line to the printer. Lots of little things add up, don't they!? Or maybe they aren't such little things after all!

Steve Hall
Sunprint