Do marketers care whether their service partners practice environmentally friendly business
practices? Absolutely! However, you must be careful to look “under the hood” when considering working with a company that tosses around the term “sustainability” like beads off a Mardi Gras float in New Orleans. You can get swept away by promises and bravado.
The printing industry has been focusing on improving its sustainability factor for many years, since traditional print manufacturing requires massive quantities of such vital resources as water and trees.
But we believe that being sustainable, or an eco-friendly printer, is not just a matter of focusing on paper reduction. Focusing on paper is just the obvious, first target.
Sustainability is a process of continuous improvement, and it affects every kind of business. It involves a lot more than a printer’s effort to reduce paper and eliminate waste, although in this industry, those are both important initiatives.
From time to time we’ll be blogging about eco friendly printing: what does it really mean? In what ways are printing companies taking care of the environment? How can marketers determine if their partner is truly an eco friendly printer?
Certainly, print on demand (POD) is part of the sustainable green printing movement. It’s eco friendly in and of itself, for it lets customers print exactly the amount they need, and no more. In addition to reducing paper waste, POD helps reduce the chances of your having outdated materials that eventually have to be tossed.
We knew of a technology firm that had a company library filled to the ceiling with copies of printed marketing materials, most of them outdated. When asked why the inventory was so massive, the CEO explained, “We print 10,000 of everything…we always have.”
Those days of overprinting “just in case” are long gone – which is good for the customer and great for the environment.
On-demand printing produces less waste than conventional offset printing. Did you know that it takes 10 times as much energy to produce a sheet of paper than to print on it?
The bottom line? Print on demand is an eco friendly practice. Waste is eliminated. Customers save money by printing less. Managing online ordering is easier and less time-consuming. Production processes are simplified and expedited on both the customer side and the print manufacturer side. You save on fulfillment costs since you’re only printing what you need at a given time.
Just as you’re wise not to bite off more than you can chew, you shouldn’t print more copies than you truly need. Print on demand – or digital printing – is the perfect solution.
