Greening Your Printing: The Wrap-Up

This is the final article in a series about making your printing more sustainable – yes, your printing can be in line with your values!

As you can see, greening your printing is easy to do. This series has introduced you to the following components of green printing:

• Getting Started – An introduction to the basics: why print green, cost concerns, and how to begin the transition to green printing.
• Design – It all begins with design, and important considerations such as why you’re designing and printing a certain piece.
• Paper – This could be the most important one of all – a whopping 76% of the carbon footprint of printing comes from paper!
• Inks – With the availability of soy inks, why would anyone want to use petroleum-based inks?

Some final considerations include:

• Mailing: Doing your printing and mailing all in one place saves you the cost and environmental impact of shipping your printed materials to a fulfillment center for mailing. In addition, your mailed material is delivered directly to your clients quicker, which allows for more lead times in production. At Greenerprinter, we can print and mail your materials (and you can purchase a mailing list, too!).
• Equipment: Newer equipment is generally more energy efficient, and in printing this applies to the presses and bindery equipment that are used to create your pieces. Printers using newer equipment are able to reduce paper waste, chemical usage, and time per order when compared to printers using old or outdated presses. Think of it like weather-proofing your house – you may be using compact flourescent light bulbs, which is a good way to reduce household energy use, but if the largest structure is inefficient, it can undermine your green efforts; in the same way, printing with old and inefficient equipment may undermine your green printing efforts. So, when you’re greening your printing, make sure that your printer is using newer and more efficient equipment.
• One-to-one marketing: This could be one of your greenest marketing solutions – target your marketing so that you print only what you need and use that to reach your audience with a personalized message. Variable data printing offers you the flexibility to deliver a highly-targeted message.

This completes the introduction to green printing, but we will be publishing additional posts to provide further information about green printing.  In the meantime, how has your experience been with green printing?

To learn more about why you should print green, read “The Top 10 Reasons to Print Green.”