Sustainable 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’?

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. (more…)

It seems like only yesterday that I was figuring out how to blog.  Believe it or not, up until early this year, I thought blogs were just online diaries of bored teens!  I like to think I’ve learned a lot the past few months.  I have had such a fun time with this blog and love learning so many new things related to Sustainable Printing.  In honor of my achievement, I’m going toot my own horn a bit and list the 10 posts I am most proud of.
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I found this article last week while perusing some of my favorite printing blogs.  This business card is quite amazing, but so, um, disgusting.  If you don’t have time to read the article, please at least visit the link and look at the picture.  It’s truly worth 1000 words.

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I recently added a few pages to Sustainable Printing that I wanted to make you aware of.  I did have a small notice of a couple of pages on my sidebar, so some of you may have already found them.  There are a total of 4 new pages that I recently added, and you can find the tabs for all of them just below my header image.

Contact Me - This page has been long over due.  Now instead of commenting to specific posts (although comments are always welcome), you have a way of sending me an email privately.  Simply fill out the form to let me know of any thoughts or questions you have on individual posts, subjects or anything!

Print Terminology - This has been on my to-do list for months, but I finally got my first version up and running!  Visit this page to see my definitions of printing terms I use often in my posts.  You can always comment on that page to let me know of a term I haven’t yet defined, and I’ll add it to the list.

Most Popular Posts - I’ve found certain posts to be getting higher visits than others (as is the case with any blog or website), so I wanted to keep them in an easy to find place.  Visit here to see what other readers are searching for on Google!

Subscribe - If you want to stay up to date on all my posts, visit this page to add my feed to a reader.  If email works better for you, you can still sign up for this method in my right sidebar column.  I have some great series planned for this summer, so I encourage you to sign up to make sure you don’t miss anything!

Until next time…