Sep 30 2009
A Printless World - Possible?
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’?
