Greengaged

photo by: Walter Parenteau

What any print designer is interested in is the product that they can hold in their hand at the end of the day; and yet design must now consider the bigger system which that finished product fits within and is born out of. In print terms, about 4.7 million tons of fresh, unused paper is thrown away by UK print companies each year as sometimes large unused off-cuts. 4.7 million tons is an unimaginably large amount; production of each ton of paper requires in the region of 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and more energy per ton than glass or steel. Do the maths on the large numbers by all means, but it’s clearly very significant.

On average, paper represents 80% of the carbon footprint of a piece of print, which makes paper one of the largest contributing factors to the environmental performance of a company. Before all the print buyers and designers evacuate the room, there are intelligent approaches that don’t mean doing away with print, by instead making its production much more effective!

Of course, since ink first hit paper, printers have tried to place more than one job on a sheet to make the printing process more efficient and cost effective, something which some printers are able to do more successfully than others. As the industry has grown the services offered by ‘Print farmers’ and large format printers have used also approaches to be able to ‘piggy back’ jobs. In recent decades however, the increasingly massive range of paper stocks, ink options, finishing, and tightening turnaround times has made this process very difficult to balance on all but the most standard of jobs. Often the solution for a printer would require compromise in the merging of different jobs, making them fit onto the same stock for example. As a result, for many printers, space is still left on each sheet, space which is immediately destined to be waste, often at huge cost to the printer, the designer, the client, and of course the environment.

Looop

One answer to this problem could be offered by looop™, an online portal connecting printers and designers throughout the UK: all of whom are more interested than ever in higher efficiencies, lower costs and benefits to the environment. The looop™ system will network together a massive range of printers who advertise unused space on a given sheet size and paper stock, allowing two or more separate jobs to be combined. Individual job requirements will be connected to the scale and possibilities of mass production!

Designers and print buyers will select printers and sheet sizes from the looop™ interface, or will be able to request availability for a particular specification in order to be approached by a printer. Following delivery of the job, the designer will leave their feedback to act as a visible measure of quality for the broader community, as per the scoring system used on sites like eBay. The other benefit to designers is that the printer’s offers will represent a significant reduction of 40% on general trade prices, and the range of print spaces on offer gives the designer more choice in paper and ink options.

looop™ doesn’t promise to deal with all the environmental standards, and it would be wonderful to see it evolve further following its launch: to see it flag up on the site the certification standards achieved by the printers, or detailing the locality and distance of printers to the area for delivery, for starters. It is also perhaps of more use to designers doing small print jobs and so may be of use to designers at the beginning of their career than agencies doing larger projects. However it does offer the print and design industries an accessible method to start reducing waste, which is a positive step forward, the presses are rolling.

looop™ is free for designers to sign up for and will launch for registrations from the beginning of October. Take a look at the looop™ site for further information, or follow them on twitter @Looopprint.

You can also find out more about paper issues through the website Lovely as a Tree.