Your customers are asking for green, your vendors are switching to eco-friendly practices and you’re starting to think about your own environmental impact. So, are you “green printing?” Are you using “green” paper, environmentally sustainable inks, and reducing your waste? Do you know where to begin?
I read a great article recently on Gather.com, How to Design an Eco-Friendly Poster, and the author, Anna Cruz, did a nice job of outlining tips to make any poster printing campaign just a little bit more “green.” That said, I still think she missed a few:
- Do shorter runs. In the Gather.com article, Cruz suggests consolidating your marketing campaigns, essentially cutting down on your poster printing by limiting the number of campaigns you run. I’d suggest that instead of running fewer campaigns just print smarter. With ultraviolet printing, you can do short, full color runs in the exact quantities you want. So, with planning, you can cut down on your printing and paper usage without having to cut your campaigns.
- Advertise your “green” printing practices. Cruz got it right on this one. She suggests putting a note or symbol on your posters letting people know you’re using recycled paper, greener inks or eco-friendly printing practices. Customers like to support a responsible organization, so let them know what you’re doing.
- Make your posters reusable. With ultraviolet printing, you can make your own green paper by creating posters that can be printed on again and again. UV inks can be applied to almost any surface, meaning you can print over the same piece of plywood or plastic again and again. Now, that’s what I call recycling.
- Go Double-sided. With offset printing, going double-sided is expensive because printers have to wait for ink to dry on both sides. With UV printing, it’s cheap, fast, simple and very cost-effective. Like Cruz points out in her Gather article, hanging your poster in a window gets you double the exposure without having to use two posters.
- Use green inks. If you’re going to implement “green” printing practices and buy “green” paper, you should also be using environmentally friendly inks. UV inks produce virtually no volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and are generally considered to be significantly more environmentally responsible than traditional chemical-based inks.