Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of commercial print with digital technologies

Many commercial print applications - book publishing, newspaper and magazine production, paper-based marketing material and numerous others - are characterized by high levels of over-production and waste. Printed matter is manufactured and distributed to end users, retailers and warehouses, where a proportion is unwanted or loses its value before being sold. Subsequently, obsolete printed material is recycled or discarded as waste. This occurs in large part as the result of business models built around traditional large scale offset litho, web-offset and gravure printing presses (we call these analog print technologies) which have evolved to deliver very low cost per page on large print runs. Newer digital press technology has the potential to re-engineer print business models and eliminate much of this waste. Paper is an exquisite technology that offers a durable, high contrast, high resolution and low power color display surface at very low cost. Despite this low cost and low environmental impact during use, paper has significant embedded Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions resulting from other phases of paper´s life cycle. In fact, in most print applications, including those mentioned above, paper is the dominant contribution to GHG emissions. Although alternatives to paper such as e-books, e-paper and erasable ink have been proposed, it is not clear that these will succeed or that they will reduce emissions; it would certainly be unwise to rely on them as the sole route to abatements. This article quantifies the GHG emissions due to inefficiencies in current commercial and office print applications and describes improved business models built on digital print and distribution technologies to conserve paper and enable GHG reductions.