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How Green Was My drupa?
June 16, 2008

Not very. With 391,000 attendees and 1,800 exhibitors in 18 halls, the event had the carbon footprint of a small nation. Especially given the continuous output of printed product at stands around the Dusseldorf grounds. 
PEFC held a conference on sustainability on June 9; FSC held meetings on June 9 and 10. Quite a number of exhibitors made their case for improved performance efficiencies that support more sustainable print operations. UPM adopted responsibility for recycling the vast tonnages of paper test-printed and run as samples at the show. 
“The customers of our customers expect environmentally friendly products," noted KBA marketing director Klaus Schmidt, reflecting a sentiment heard frequently from press manufacturers was "This pushes us to make low carbon footprint machines.“ While, “inkjet has the best potential for the future," Schmidt said, "at the moment there will be a coalition between the two processes. That is good for the industry.” Schmidt, whose boss, Albrecht Bolza-Schünemann, is also the chair of the drupa organization, acknowledged during a press conference that a good deal of paper is theoretically wasted in demonstration production at drupa. "But ultimately this makes the industry more efficient," he said.
The European position on sustainability in commercial printing is a few years ahead of that of the U.S. marketplace. To get an update on some of the technology, market and operational trends in the "green print movement," Graphic Arts Monthly and Intertech-PIRA is staging a conference in Philadelphia Thursday and Friday week at the Doubletree Inn: Sustainability in Printing. 
Yours truly is co-chairing the event, and there will be a panel at 4:00 pmThursday, June 19 on
"Green print-buyer dynamics"
Moderated by: Bill Esler, Editor in Chief, Graphic Arts Monthly 
Panelists:
Peter Cook, CEO of Concord Litho
Erik Braun, CEO of InktreeInc.com
Jeff Morrow, VP Sales & Sustainability at Label Impressions and Natural Source Printing
Don Seitz, EVP Sales and Business Development, HubCast Inc. 

Posted by Bill Esler on June 16, 2008 | Comments (2)