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It’s Not Easy Being Green
November 25, 2007

Last week I was in Atlanta at the I-TAG meetings. I-TAG stands for Industry Trends Analysis Group and is a NAPL invitation-only focus group to address the topics identified as critical by NAPL's Printing Economic Research Center (PERC). Those who are invited are typically companies that have been working with our research efforts and form the backbone of our trends research. The purpose of I-TAG is to help set the direction for the research efforts for the next year.

This year the subjects included:
- The Changing Nature of Competition
- Green Manufacturing
- Customer Focus

What I found most interesting was the “green initiative”. Admittedly, I have not been following this closely – so this kinda snuck up on me. I don’t know exactly when it emerged as the “next big thing” but it may have something to do with the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”.

According to the movie, global warming is the Inconvenient truth and we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.

This has convinced people that the Earth is warming (77% said so in a Pew Foundation poll in January) and now we are seeing that printing executives are motivated to take action. And for good reason, the combined paper and print industry ranks fourth among manufacturers for energy use, after chemicals, petroleum/coal and primary metals.

This has become such a hot topic that we are already planning workshops to discuss this at our next NAPL Top Management Conference at the Ritz-Carlton Grande lakes in Orlando on March 9-12, 2008.

Next issue more about the motivation and momentum to be more eco-friendly.

Posted by Howie Fenton on November 25, 2007 | Comments (0)