The green badge of honour: Print 21 magazine article

Printing is often portrayed as an excessive polluter, but as the world moves inexorably towards legislated greenhouse gas reduction targets, the industry finally has a chance to show how far it has come over the past two decades. It’s a badge of honour that printers should wear with pride, says Phillip Lawrence.

Last month, the US government introduced new national regulations aimed at reducing the level of automobile emissions for greenhouse gases. This is a clear indicator of a possible future direction that governments, not only in the US, will take in addressing the important issue of global climate change. While other governments around the world have been struggling with emissions trading schemes, carbon taxes and carbon targets, the US government, surprisingly, is introducing targets set by the law against industry.

As ominous as this sounds, climatologists and environmental academics see this as the strongest method of addressing climate change; anything else is pandering to the interests of too many stakeholder groups. A target set in legislation is a number that must be achieved. Most importantly, being a number, it must be verified and measured continuously. I think this is a big win potentially for the printing industry.

Printing is often viewed as a polluting industry by its customers as well as government. They continually question the industry about its environmental credentials such as forestry certifications and environmental standards such as ISO 14001. However, when it comes to a full life-cycle analysis of technologies, this is where printing can have the upper hand over other mass communication technologies, if measured fairly.

Better than the 90s
The printing industry has been through some massive changes in technology in all aspects of the production cycle. The Masters research that I have just completed has looked at how the industry has changed since the Kyoto-based year of 1990. My research project looked at how the industry was performing in 1990 and compared it to how the industry was performing in 2005. It revealed that the printing industry has achieved so much more than any other industry sector.

The perception in society that printing is a polluting industry has more to do with emotion and appearances than reality. There’s no getting away from the fact that printing originates from trees, and that trees are nature. However, society conveniently forgets that food crops and industrial crops around the world are all run on land that was once populated by forests. In Australia alone, more than 13 million hectares of land has been cleared to grow wheat.

The pressure on food production and therefore crops has been recognised by the United Nations over the past couple of years as a growing concern for the immediate future. For example, in the mid-1950s when I was born there were about 2.5 billion people on the planet; in 2009 there are 6.7 billion people and by the time I die there will be more than 10 billion. It’s inevitable that vastly more land clearing has to take place for food production or somehow we need to increase the crop yield from the existing farmlands that have already been cleared.

Trees used for paper production make up an insignificant percentage of the total usage of trees harvested around the world. The vast majority of trees are used in construction purposes in various forms. Paper and pulp production is responsible for a little over 5 percent of the harvested trees used by all industry. Yet despite this, when people consider printing they believe that a reduction in print is going to make a significant contribution to maintaining the world’s forestry. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

More efficient now
The printing industry historically was not a clean industry; it used chemicals and lots of other resources. However, over the past 20 years, there has been a series of massive technological changes that have occurred. In my thesis, I describe these as responses to the intense competition that exists in the industry. Michael Porter at Harvard University, after looking at 104 different industries, described the printing industry as the world’s most competitive industrial sector.

Printing firms around the world are engaged in imitation whereby they copy their best competitor, and the most common form of imitation is installing extremely efficient printing and prepress technologies. The new printing technologies, like the ones at PacPrint this year, are incredibly efficient compared to the technologies that were in common use in 1990. Anyone who was in the industry in 1990 and can remember the solvents, the film, the energy and waste of paper will no doubt be astounded by how much the industry has transformed.

The printing industry has achieved so much, and yet communicated so little. The industry stakeholders are totally unaware of the achievements that have been made by the industry. With the introduction of greenhouse gas emissions legislation, the opportunity is there for the industry to document, through rigorous research, the numbers that prove the industry has gone far beyond the targets that were set at the Kyoto summit in 1997.