The Green Issue

Our company has been trying to be greener for as long as I can remember.  At least as long as the first green trend in the 90’s.    We are all trying to clean up our act, but it’s confusing how one effort creates another problem and it seems to go around and around.  Paper kills trees, but plastic stays with us for life, but it generates more carbon to output a CD than it does to create (4) 100 page books.  What’s the right answer?

As usual, Print Guru Frank Romano has a sassy answer.

I think we all try to do our share and it will take each of us to really make a difference. The printing industry is among the greenest industries but now we have to prove it with complex paperwork — which creates more paper to re-cycle. The whole business of trading carbon contracts like bubble gum cards is being reviewed by the UN body that administers them. Carbon contracts remind me of Medieval indulgences that promised Heavenly benefits if you pay your money now.

Easy being Green

We are now tri certified!

Daniels Graphics is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) program and by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification schemes (PEFC).

Each of these organizations are focused on chain of custody (CoC) certification, which documents the entire path taken by a tree from the forest to the mill, to the printer, to the end-use consumer.

This effort takes environmentally minded paper past simply recycling.  This is an effort to reduce illegal deforestation which has an effect on both the ecological landscape,  and indigenous people.

We can gaurantee a printed piece has been ethically handled from the tree to the piece.

Dead Tree Medium

Great article from Wharton detailing that print outperforms digital marketing:

According to Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow, print offers marketers a clear advantage over digital media, such as email. “Many people see email as impersonal and costless to write,” he says. “People want to feel special. In marketing [terms], email is transactional; paper is relational.”

Ed Manzitti, chief researcher at the DMA, suggests that paper is both relational and transactional. “Print is very much a potent channel for marketers,” he says. “It has a flexibility that online doesn’t offer to the same degree, and it has the possibility of tremendous personalization. But the biggest attraction may be simply that people read it — to a degree they don’t read email. The marketer can include four or five pages of words with the expectation it will get read. An email? You better make it short and punchy, because that’s all you can expect will be read — maybe.”