Greenerprinter was delighted to participate in the second annual California Sustainable Tourism Summit in South Lake Tahoe. During this two-day summit (Oct. 14 and 15), top industry leaders presented best practices for sustainable tourism and outlined how to promote sustainable efforts efficiently and effectively. This event was sponsored by the California Travel & Tourism Commission.

A quick web search will yield a large array of eco-tours and mission-driven travel companies in business today. One of the original companies to offer “reality tours” was Global Exchange (yep, the same folks that bring you Green Festivals each year).

Volunteerism is a hot a trend in ecotourism right now. Why not give back to a community while enjoying what it has to offer? Many non-profit organizations – such as Builders Without Borders, Amigos de las Americas, Travel-to-Teach and more – specialize in fun, rewarding experiences for volunteer vacations.

Greenerprinter supports the environmental travel industry by helping ecotourism companies meet their triple bottom line (people, planet, profit). Some of our most popular travel products include:

• Maps – Our state-of-the art finishing equipment can create expert maps folded to your specification.
• High-quality brochures – Always a hit. And brochures are currently 15 percent off!
• Fliers – Get the message out about your ecotourism company while reducing your company’s impact on the planet! Fliers are 15 percent off through October 31.
• Eco-friendly postcards – Include postcards in your business’s next marketing campaign. Postcard are currently 10 percent off.
• Folded booklets – A quick and engaging way to showcase your green travel company. Choose 80# Reincarnation Matte paper for the best balance between quality and sustainability.

And when you return from your eco-friendly vacation (or want to show off your tour packages to potential customers), share your photo keepsakes with our high-quality recycled paper photo books.

Remember, ecotourism isn’t a travel style just for far-flung places. Many low-impact adventures can be found right in your area. For example, kayak down a nearby river, take a guided walk through a nature preserve in your bioregion or book a lake cruise to view birds and other wildlife up-close. Check your state’s travel and tourism website for a list of local travel outfitters.

It’s almost hard to believe, but it’s true. People are already asking us about recycled paper Christmas cards!

With Greenerprinter, you can choose to upload your own Halloween or Thanksgiving card design online (just perfect for creating unique, one-of-a-kind greetings that your friends and family will cherish).

Or if you are getting a jump on December planning this year, choose from Greenerprinter’s many colorful and stylish Christmas cards featured in the Holiday Card Design Center. See below for a sample of one of our wintry designs.

No matter how you create your greeting cards, rest assured that each design will be print using high-quality eco-friendly vegetable and soy ink.

2010 has been brought many unprecedented challenges and opportunities to green business owners nationwide. Tell your clients that you appreciate them while also making your business holiday cards or corporate Christmas cards stand out from the pack.

How? When designing your Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas card, opt to showcase a staff photo when you design your eco-friendly cards. You could also include your business’ Quick Response (QR) code for some added pizazz and interactivity. Need to learn more about how QR codes can work for you? Take a look at a recent Greenerprinter blog post or view several of our print samples to learn more.

Of course, each card (and envelope) you order will arrive printed on the recycled paper stock of your choice. What better way to show your support for a just and healthy world but by sending holiday greeting cards made from recycled materials and sustainable inks?

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.”

Up until recently, the printing industry has used petroleum-based inks, which have two primary environmental drawbacks. First, they are made using a non-renewable resource (petroleum). Second, petroleum-based inks release Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs); VOCs reduce indoor air quality and can have negative short- and long-term health effects. Fortunately, an environmentally responsible alternative is available: soy inks, which are derived from soy beans. This alternative was originally developed for use in newspaper printing, but has spread to the printing of other items, such as your business cards, marketing collateral, and product catalogs.

So what are the actual benefits of using soy inks instead of petroleum-based inks? And, how will it affect the colors on your printed piece?

• Soy inks are more sustainable – they come from a renewable resource, unlike petroleum
• Soy inks are more environmentally friendly – some actually release zero VOCs (this is what we use at Greenerprinter)
• Paper printed with soy inks can be deinked more easily, making it easier to recycle
• Spot colors are available, so you can still get the exact color you need in your logo
• You actually get colors that are brighter and more vivid – and pop!

What does this mean for you? This is a simple but important step in green printing. Make sure that all of your printing is done using soy inks. You’ll still get the great color that you want (except for fluorescent and metallic colors, which are petroleum-based), but with twice the environmental benefit – fewer emissions during the production process, and the paper will be easier to recycle afterwards. Now, what can be easier than that?

Our series wraps up with final Green Printing considerations.

One of the biggest reasons to green your printing is to reduce your paper footprint. Since every sheet of non-recycled or virgin paper comes from forests, using less paper results in fewer trees being cut down (we use only recycled paper and saved over 5,000 trees in 2008!). In fact, Conservatree suggests that one ton of office and printing paper may require up to 24 trees.

According to the Forest Stewardship Council, the U.S. is the largest market for paper products in the world, producing 90 million tons of paper and consuming about 100 million tons each year; about 25% of timber cut annually in the U.S. is used to make paper. To mitigate the impact of forest destruction, two strategies have evolved:

1. Use recycled content as much as possible. In the recycling process, paper is washed and deinked before being made into pulp. This pulp goes through a bleaching process (ideally processed chlorine free) and is formed into paper by removing the water, drying the paper, and cutting it into rolls or sheets for use. An important measure to look for in recycled paper is the post-consumer waste content. The difference between recycled and post-consumer waste (PCW) is that PCW refers to paper that has already been used by consumers – basically, it’s the paper that we toss into our recycle bins – whereas recycled paper might include materials that never reached the consumer, such as magazines that were printed but never sold.
2. Use virgin paper from sustainably harvested forests. Recycled paper only accounts for part of our paper supply. According to the EPA, our paper comes from three sources:  recycled materials, whole trees and other plants, and wood chips and scraps from sawmills, with about 1/3 of our paper coming from each of these categories. The Forest Stewardship Council has taken a leading role in addressing the second source of recycled paper by establishing principles and criteria that take into account the social and environmental impact of the forests from which the trees are harvested and by certifying printers and papers that stick to these standards.

What does this mean for your print decisions? First, remember that not all recycled papers are the same – there’s a significant difference between a paper that is only 30% recycled with no PCW and a paper that is 100% recycled with 100% PCW – and choose the paper with the highest post-consumer content. Second, select FSC-certified printers and papers whenever possible. By taking these two steps, you can lighten your paper footprint.

You can learn more with a handy recycled paper glossary that our friends at New Leaf Paper (who supply our house stock) have prepared that breaks it all down for you!

The Greening Your Printing series continues with a look at Soy Inks.

The importance of design in green printing cannot be underestimated. After all, as printers, we will work with the files and specifications that you provide to us. Certainly, we’ll ensure that recycled papers and soy inks are used, but the decisions about what needs to be printed, for what purpose, and in what quantities are generally decided upon beforehand.

The folks at Design Can Change have gathered some great resources for designers who want to incorporate more sustainable practices into their work. They have prepared a Sustainable Design Checklist that covers topics such as strategy, execution, production, distribution, and end-of-useful life.  Some of their suggestions for auditing the sustainability of a printed piece include:

• Serves multiple purposes and maximizes shelf life
• Raises awareness by displaying environmental specs
• Limits ink coverage and areas of solid color
• Is printed by a printer that has environmental certification
• Uses recycled, FSC-certified paper that was processed chlorine-free
• Uses soy- and vegetable-based inks and avoids metallic inks
• Avoids foilstamping, thermography, and lamination
• Uses up-to-date mailing lists that accurately target your audience

Another great resource that takes a holistic perspective on sustainability in graphic design is Green Graphic Design. This new book begins by asking designers to look at the end result of their work – what will happen to it after it’s been used? It then challenges designers to “design backwards,” a process similar in concept to backcasting. In this case, designers would begin by considering where the piece will end up, what the user experience will be, how it will be distributed (including delivery and warehousing) and what the production process will be (including printing and bindery).

The next article in the series examines Recycled Paper.

How has sustainability influenced your work in designing a printed piece? What additional tips or resources would you provide?

Why print green?

For starters, the environmental benefits are significant – in 2008 alone, we saved over 5,000 trees and almost 2,000,000 gallons of water! Rather than using virgin paper and petroleum-based inks, green printers use only recycled paper and soy- and vegetable-based inks, and offset their carbon emissions. Also, green printing can produce the same level of quality as traditional printing, so you don’t have to sacrifice quality. Consumers today expect companies and organizations to be environmentally responsible; printing green allows you to take a first step towards sustainability if you’re just getting started – and if you’re already on the green path, you can more fully demonstrate your commitment to protecting our environment.

Will it cost more?

We recognize that this is an important consideration, especially during times like these. The truth is that sometimes it does, but not always. Green printers need to consider certain costs that traditional printers don’t: Higher prices for recycled paper, carbon offsets & renewable energy credits, newer equipment to minimize waste & inefficiencies, and certification costs to name a few. However, printers generally offer more competitive pricing for projects that fit their specific capabilities, and this holds true for most green printers as well.

How can I get started?

If you’re already using traditional printing, greening your printing is simple because the basic design and printing processes are the same. The best way to get started is to familiarize yourself with recycled papers and recycled paper terminology (recycled paper does vary slightly more in density and color than virgin paper). You may find it helpful to obtain a sample packet first and start with a small order. We’ll also be providing you with additional tips and resources through the Greening Your Printing series.

The next article in the series covers Green Design.

Have you already made the switch to green printing? If so, please share your experience on the transition. What prompted you to do it? How has it worked for you?

This is our starting point. The scientific case for climate change – and our responsibility for it – has been made. In 2007, a U.N. Panel of over 1200 scientists from 130 countries issued a report concluding that climate change is real, and we will all be affected by it. In testimony at the end of February before the House Ways and Means Committee, a geochemist with the Union of Concerned Scientists confirmed again the importance of regulating emissions, especially since the ocean is reaching its limit of absorbing carbon.  Even the EPA is now considering regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

So what does this mean for printers and print buyers? Like all other businesses – and individuals – we need to make changes. At Greenerprinter, we’ve been working on this. We began offering recycled paper and soy inks exclusively years ago to help businesses and individuals incorporate their green values into their printing. And in our own operations, we are certified as a Green Business, and we offset our carbon emissions.

But this isn’t enough, and we know it. The question for us is: what’s next?

We hope that our blog can serve as a forum in which we can all share our ongoing efforts to become more sustainable, as well as provide resources and information about green printing. We welcome your thoughts about the challenges and opportunities that you have encountered on your own green journey!