Sustainable Printing

A while back on Sustainable Printing, I introduced my readers to GreenPrint, a technology that saves unwanted pages from being printed from the internet.  Earlier this summer, GreenPrint Technologies came out with GreenPrint Version 2.0, which promises to be a large improvement over the previous program.

As detailed in this article from the New York Times, GreenPrint has had its time of hardship and struggle.  While the idea of reducing print pages from the web is brilliant and desperately needed, it wasn’t as easy as the founders of GreenPrint had hoped.  The first version was slow and often, people would turn the program off because they didn’t want to have to wait so long to print.  Because of this and other technical issues, GreenPrint had a hard time landing contracts with large corporations.

There was one company, however, that decided to partner with GreenPrint in a unique way.  Xerox has been including one free copy of GreenPrint software with the purchase of any of their solid-ink printers.  I also wrote a post on Xerox’s ColorCube being an eco-friendly alternative to office inkjets.  Coupling solid-ink technology and GreenPrint software, an office can greatly reduce its environmental impact from printing.

Even if you don’t buy a Xerox solid-ink printer, you can download a free copy of GreenPrint World for home use at printgreener.com.  For more features and usability, GreenPrint Home Premium is available for $29 per license, and GreenPrint Enterprise is available for businesses.

I encourage you to try GreenPrint as an eco-friendly way to reduce your printing.

Today on Sustainable Printing, I want to delve into what our lives would be like if printing suddenly ceased in all forms and fashions.  A lot of environmentalists would like to live in a “paperless” world, but I want to take that a step further and explore a “printless” world.  Would that be a good place to live?

Without printing, we wouldn’t have photographs.  We all remember photographs right?  Since the onset of digital cameras, I’m sure printing photographs has declined somewhat, but what if we couldn’t print photos of our child’s Halloween costume, sister’s wedding or parents’ anniversary party?  My mom creates beautiful scrapbooks of our family, and one of the albums she calls the “Heritage Album”.  This book has photos of her great, great grandparents…some dating back to the 1890s.  Without prints, we would lose out on a part of our history.

What about all the formal documents one needs during his or her lifetime?  Birth certificate, social security card, passport, driver’s license, high school diploma, marriage license, etc.?  Would we need to have such identifiers tattooed on our bodies somewhere?

Imagine what going to any store would be like if none of the packages had printing on them.  Your box of Captain Crunch would look identical to the Cocoa Crispies sitting next to it.  How would we recognize which DVD we want to buy if they had no printed insert telling us which movie is inside?

And how could we pay for such merchandise without paper currency?  Would we be standing at the checkout with giant bags of coins?  There wouldn’t be any barcodes to utilize the quick scanners at the checkout, so we’d probably be in line long enough waiting for our totals to count the coins we’d need to use to pay for our items.

I know this was a fanciful illustration of a completely impossible world (at least in my lifetime), but doesn’t it get your noodle cookin’?

A few weeks ago on Sustainable Printing, I wrote about Neenah Paper’s Do You Love Linen promotion.  I signed up to receive some samples, and they arrived at my door less than a week later.  I’ve been meaning to post my thoughts, but have not had the time to write about it until now. Continue Reading »

I’ve been on a mission here at Sustainable Printing to introduce innovative products and services in the printing industry to my readers.   I have told print buyers about BioFlex biodegradable banners and Tyvek recyclable banners.  I’ve introduced them to eco friendly office supplies from Sustainable Group and listed some tree-free paper choices on the market.  Well, today, I am happy to talk about a great company I found called Label Impressions.

Continue Reading »

Papers devoid of color?  The simple answer, yes, but not exactly right.

Since I started Sustainable Printing, whenever I come across something I may have heard about, but never really understood, I research it until it makes sense.  Then, I pass it along to my readers. Continue Reading »