A little more than two weeks later, after an uproar from the American and global paper and printing industries, Toshiba pulled the plug on the campaign.

Ignorant statements such as ‘We know that approximately 336 million sheets of paper are wasted daily’, ‘more than 40,000 trees are discarded every day in America’ and ‘we as individuals and companies are failing to make the link between printing waste and its negative impacts on our landfills, natural resources and the environment’ was just the stuff that organisations such as Printing Industries of America and Two Sides have to challenge on a regular basis.

“Toshiba seems to have ignored the environmental impact of electronic communications. Just saying you are eliminating print and paper really does not mean you are necessarily helping the planet,” wrote Two Sides member Vince Collins in a June 13 response to NNPD. “It’s a lot more complex than that. If the alternative is, for example, electronic communication, then what is the environmental impact of this?”

The National Association for Printing Leadership also had its say: “The real waste problem is the rapidly escalating number of discarded computers and other electronic components, which are not biodegradable and will sit in landfills for generations, taking up increasing amounts of space and ultimately leaching lead, mercury, and other toxic metals, hazardous chemicals, and plastic residue into the soil.”

Greenpeace has identified electronic waste as the fastest growing component of the municipal waste steam[i].

In an article published by Graphic Repro On-line, Two Sides challenges the campaign as ‘greenwashing’, with the following:

• “Toshiba has linked paper use to deforestation (or killing trees and destroying forests) when, in fact, responsibly made paper can be a sustainable way to communicate. Paper is a highly recycled commodity in Europe, with a recycling rate approaching 70%. [ii] Does Toshiba recycle its products so effectively? We think not.”
• “Paper is based on wood, a natural and renewable material. Electronic equipment, ink and toner cartridges, including those with the Toshiba brand, are made mostly from non-renewable resources and are not so easily recycled. Has Toshiba considered the life cycle of all of its own products before professing expertise on others?”
• “What do the thousands of men and women employed by Toshiba to manufacture, sell and distribute copiers, printers and toner cartridges worldwide think about this campaign?”

Much more has been written about the failed campaign.  Simply pour yourself a big mug of your favourite beverage and Google ‘Toshiba No Print Day’. Much of it is constructive; some simply laughable.

As the industry, we need to stand together against the promulgation of ‘anti-paper’ ignorance.  Arm yourself with the facts and enlighten colleagues, family and friends (download our paper fact sheet) and ask them to remove footers from their emails such as ‘Consider the environment before you print this’ (download some alternative footers).

While PAMSA certainly does not advocate wasteful printing, we ask that paper and printing be treated with respect:

• Buy locally manufactured paper that is FSC-certified. This way you can be assured that the paper is produced from sustainably managed plantations.
• Reuse your paper – print draft documents on the reverse side.
• Recycle your paper, keeping it dry and away from other waste.

Lastly, be responsible with your electronic waste. Do your research and find reputable electronic waste recycling companies that you know will handle your old computers and printers with the environment in mind.

The post Toshiba’s National No-Print Day causes paper jam first appeared on The Paper Story (PAMSA).

NEW YORK, Aug. 6, 2012 (RISI)

A recent marketing campaign by Toshiba was the cause this time. The company, a global manufacturer of consumer and commercial printers, among many other products, sought to establish a “No Print Day” and hoped to show the environmental benefits of reducing paper use in the office. Within hours, due in large part to social media, battle lines were drawn between paper supporters and opponents, largely centering on whether a business that depends on the paper industry should be calling for paper’s demise.

The idea of a paperless office, and possibly a paperless society, has held sway over business’ imagination like few other topics. Since 1975, when Businessweek magazine article declared the office of the future would thrive without paper, primarily through automation and technological advancements, the theory of living without paper has become like the search for the Higgs Bosen particle.

Is a paperless office possible?

Demand for pulp and paper is approaching an all-time high. Foex, the Finnish company that publishes pulp, paper and paperboard price indexes, predicts the global paper market could reach a new record of 400 million tons in 2012. Another report earlier this year by Global Industry Analysts estimates global pulp and paper products consumption would grow to reach 446 million tons by 2015.

But these simple numbers betray a more complex trend. Global usage is expected to be largest in high-growth, high-potential markets, mainly in developing countries. In contrast, paper usage in the US and Europe has been falling steadily for the past five years and is expected to continue. The estimated number of office pages printed, copies and faxed annually in the US peaked in 2007 at more than 1 trillion pages, according to InfoTrends, and looks to fall further for the next five years.

After nearly six centuries, since the invention of the Guttenberg press, paper usage in many developed countries finally appears to be diminishing. This does not mean paper is due for extinction any time soon. Instead, there are a myriad of factors that look to keep paper around for decades and perhaps centuries to come.

Stubborn challenges remain

One of the biggest obstacles for eliminating paper in most homes and offices is legal documents, a problem first mentioned in the Businessweek article. “It always takes longer than we expect to change the way people customarily do their business,” said Evelyn Berezin, president of Redacton Corp., which once held the second-largest installed-base of text-editing typewriters, behind IBM. Both companies are still in business today.

There are still wide misunderstandings on the legal differences between a digital signature, a handwritten signature, and a digital image of that same signature.

The US Internal Revenue Service provides a telling example of how long it has taken habits to change. In 2012, electronic fillings of individual tax returns increased 6.2% to 113 million out of a total of 137 million. Pre-printing of forms and publications has decreased proportionally, instead relying on printable PDF versions from websites for individuals and businesses. It would seem the public is finally ready to actively abandon paper for electronic documents.

But businesses often must take a different approach, simply because of regulations and legal requirements. The legal force of physical paper frequently holds more symbolic power than digital documents in courts and legal proceedings, despite electronic records management and electronic documents laws in many countries, including the US, Canada, and most of Europe. Insurance documents, wills, bank statements, accounting records all must be held for various lengths of time and many legal advisors still recommend keeping permanent paper records of the most important documents, such as stock certificates, articles of incorporation and tax records.

Digital signatures form another problem. While many government authorities have electronic document policies on the books, the laws and standards surrounding digital signatures in place of physical or handwritten signatures are not uniform. Public understanding, as well as time and costs, are still on the side of pen to paper. There are still wide misunderstanding on the legal differences between a digital signature, a handwritten signature, and a digital image of that same signature.

Our digital culture

The publishing industry is acutely aware of paper’s decline, although more as a medium of transmission than a loss of information. Jeff Gomez, author of Print is Dead – Books in our Digital Age, says that paper will never disappear. Instead, society is slowly making its way toward an age less centered on paper transactions.

“The same way we still have candles even though there’s electric light, paper will always exist in a multitude of forms and formats,” says Gomez. “Whether this means the way information is shared, money is exchanged, or even the way we pay bills or communicate with each other.”

There is a middle ground to be found between paper and print, explains Gomez. If anything, our culture is headed for an era where paper will be celebrated for its inherent worth and beauty. Many paper producers and commercial printers are already taking this approach, emphasizing how paper can add value in conjunction with, or in contrast to, the digital.

“Books that continue to be printed will celebrate their ‘print-ness’,” says Gomez, “by having gorgeous covers and beautifully designed interiors with textured pages that feel good to the touch.” There will also be digital-only novels, adds Gomez, that celebrate their ‘digital-ness’ by taking advantage of new and emerging digital technology.

To understand the future of paper, says Gomez, there is a need to define the difference between print and paper.

“The idea of print means lots of things. Yes, it’s true that newspapers are in trouble and that the industry, in the past decade, has contracted at an alarming rate. But the fact that huge swaths of the world’s populations find their information online or through mobile devices means that print no longer has an inherent cultural function. But paper still has plenty of other uses, both aesthetically and functionally; it will never go the way of the dodo.”

he book-on-demand printing business, such as the Espresso Book Machine in partnership with Xerox, has yet to provide a suitable alternative to either print or digital.

Corporate strategies

The world is full of irony. When Toshiba recently announced its marketing campaign for a “No Print Day,” another older, larger question raised its head again. Should companies with an investment in the pulp and paper business advocate for a paper-less society?

In that 1975 Businessweek article, George E. Pake, at the time the head of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, said that the office copier giant was developing a new strategy for how business worked. “There is absolutely no question there will be a revolution in the office over the next 20 years. What we are doing will change the office like the jet plane revolutionized travel and the way TV has altered family life.”

In this moment, Xerox declared it was not a paper-based company, but an information technology company. Whether paper is used or not would become irrelevant to how Xerox saw the future of the office. Malcolm Gladwell, in his 2002 article “The Social Life of Paper” agreed by saying “Computer technology was supposed to replace paper.” Society’s continuing need for paper has less to do with technology and more to do with intangibles and he points out that paper use has not disappeared as quickly as many had hoped or planned.

“This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerizations,” writes Gladwell. “A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don’t agree. Paper, they argue, has persisted for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers.”

In the last decade, paper use in Europe and North America has indeed fallen and businesses now regularly push for paperless solutions to many tasks. Whether this is smart business is another debate. But it is interesting to note that the industry has been in a similar situation before.

Wood use for fuel in the United States peaked in 1906. After that, firewood use plunged as coal, and later natural gas, would replace it. Overall, US wood consumption would not surpass its former high until the 1980s. In that same time, the US population grew by approximately 150 million people. The cultural change in wood consumption over those seven decades can be attributed to corporate vision and technology advances as well as public perceptions.

For the time being, the evidence points to society using less paper. But there appears to be little proof of going paperless anytime soon.

The post The debate about the paperless office has flared again first appeared on The Paper Story (PAMSA).

The post Toshiba pulls National No Print Day first appeared on The Paper Story (PAMSA).

1. What is the source of that statistic about 336 million sheets of paper wasted every day, and what exactly do you mean by “wasted”?
2. According to that statistic, one tree is “discarded” for every 8300 sheets — less than 90 pounds of office paper — that is “wasted”. But only one-third of that 90 pounds comes from whole trees; the rest is from sawmill residue and recycled fiber. What idiot is getting a yield of only 30 pounds of paper from an entire tree?
3. Paper is made mostly from renewable resources and has a high recycling rate. Ink and toner cartridges, including those with the Toshiba brand, are made mostly from non-renewable resources and are not often recycled. Have you considered that much of printing’s impact on our planet has nothing to do with paper usage?
4. Why is it necessarily better for the planet to read a report on an electricity-burning computer than on sheets of paper?
5. You promise to plant some trees if we take the pledge. Will Toshiba actually plant the trees, or are you paying someone else to plant them? Where will the trees be planted? What will happen to the land if no one takes the pledge?
6. You imply that the harvesting of trees is inherently evil. If private landowners can no longer make money from trees, they’ll seek other uses of their land. Would it be better if they planted wheat? Or maybe shopping centers?
7. American farmers “discard” far more than 40,000 corn plants every day in the process of harvesting them. Are you going to organize a No Corn, Ethanol, or Grain-Fed Meat Day?
8. Toshiba makes a variety of electronic products. Are you planning to celebrate a No-Toxic-Materials-in-Laptops Day?
9. If we take the pledge to give Tree a day off, how are we supposed to blow our noses on Oct. 23? And will Toshiba America offices remove the toilet paper from their restrooms that day?
10. Why the hell did Toshiba just exhibit at Drupa, the world’s largest trade fair for printers, if one of its divisions was going to turn around and publicly trash the entire printing industry?

• OK, Johnny, Now Greenwash Your Hands
• Google Using Blatant Greenwash To Promote New Catalog App
• Smackdown: Printed Editions vs. Digital Editions

The post Ten questions about Toshiba’s No-Print Day first appeared on The Paper Story (PAMSA).

Press release from the issuing company

“Toshiba may have meant well when it attempted to publicize its ‘print leaner and greener’ initiative with a ‘National No-Print Day’ campaign, but it was well off base when it pointed a finger at print as an anti-tree medium,” said National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL) President and Chief Executive Officer Joseph P. Truncale, Ph.D. “Despite this all-too-often repeated anti-print “save a tree” refrain, print and paper are simply not enemies of the environment.

“Reading a book on a tablet may be convenient, but it is not more environmentally friendly than reading a printed copy,” he continued. “Paying a bill online may be quicker, but it is not better for the woodlands than paying it by check. Why? Because paper is a renewable, recyclable, and biodegradable resource, while computers and other electronic devices are comprised primarily of one-time-use only metals and hydrocarbon-based materials, and they require energy created principally through the use of other non-renewable resources.”

NAPL has long pointed out that paper production uses trees, but it does not destroy forests. Paper companies depend on trees for their business, so they plant more trees than they harvest each year, carefully managing forests on privately owned lands for maximum tree growth and production.

In fact, despite the billions of sheets of paper that have been produced, the United States has about 12 million more acres of forest land now than it did a quarter of a century ago, and overall forest inventory has increased 49% over the last half-century. Every day, more than 1.7 million trees are planted in the U.S., nearly half of them (45%) by the forest products industry. You might say that every printed page helps plant a tree. By comparison, according to Time magazine, more than 130,000 computers are discarded by Americans every day.

The problem at landfills is not paper, which is recycled at very high levels, providing many towns and cities with an important income source. The real waste problem is the rapidly escalating number of discarded computers and other electronic components, which are not biodegradable and will sit in landfills for generations, taking up increasing amounts of space and ultimately leaching lead, mercury, and other toxic metals, hazardous chemicals, and plastic residue into the soil. Electronics now make up the fastest-growing part of the U.S. waste stream.

Everyone in the printing industry has the same interest as Toshiba in making our processes as environmentally friendly as possible, and we have all been working toward that goal for decades. Witness, for example, the growth of forest-certification and chain-of-custody programs, the new technologies that increase the paper yield per trees—in some cases, 90,000 sheets from a single cord of wood, and the use of renewable biomass fuels to power paper manufacturing—since 1990, purchased energy and fossil fuel use per ton of paper production has been cut by 26%.

As NAPL stated in an article two years ago, “The environmental impact of any communications process generally occurs at one or more of three stages: the creation of the medium being used for the message, the transmission of the message, and the conclusion or aftermath of the process. At each point, paper-based communications have a less injurious environmental effect than their electronic counterpart. Print and electronic media will coexist in the future and complement each other’s strengths. And one of paper‘s undeniable strengths is its position as an environmentally friendly messaging medium.”

Whatever Toshiba’s well-intentioned environmental goals may be,” said Truncale, “it is simply short-sighted and wrong-headed to suggest that the environment is harmed by the use of paper and printing.”

In Brief:

• Paper is a renewable resource, grown and replenished in managed forests; the precious metals and hydrocarbons required to create computers and other electronic devices are not—they require mining and drilling that can damage the surrounding ecosystem, and when they have been removed from the earth, they are gone forever.
• Paper is recyclable—nearly two-thirds of U.S. paper consumed is now recovered—and much is reused, more than one-third of the world’s total fiber supply now coming from recycled paper; computer components are used once—often after just a few years of rapid obsolescence—and then this toxic e-waste is discarded in landfills or shipped to developing countries.
• Paper requires only sunlight or the power of a single light bulb to be read and used; computers require a continuous stream of electricity generated predominantly by non-renewable fossil fuel energy sources. In 2006, for example, Internet data servers alone purchased twice the amount of energy purchased by the U.S. pulp and paper industry.

The post NAPL: Toshiba ‘No-Print Day’ Campaign Points Wrongful Finger at Print first appeared on The Paper Story (PAMSA).

On this day Toshiba proposes to ‘raise awareness of the impact printing has on our planet’ and of ‘the role of paper in the workplace’, They are asking people and companies not to print or copy anything that day. This campaign is backed up by a number of contentious and unsourced claims designed to support this ill-conceived initiative.

There are many flaws surrounding Toshiba’s campaign including:

 • Toshiba seems to have ignored the environmental impact of electronic communications. Just saying you are eliminating print and paper really does not mean you are necessarily helping the planet. It’s a lot more complex than that. If the alternative is, for example, electronic communication, then what is the environmental impact of this? Greenpeace have identified electronic waste as the fastest growing component of the municipal waste steam. (1)
• Toshiba has linked paper use to deforestation (or killing trees and destroying forests) when, in fact, responsibly made paper can be a sustainable way to communicate. Paper is a highly recycled commodity in Europe, with a recycling rate approaching 70 per cent. (2) Does Toshiba recycle its products so effectively? We think not.
• Paper is based on wood, a natural and renewable material. Electronic equipment, ink and toner cartridges, including those with the Toshiba brand, are made mostly from non-renewable resources and are not so easily recycled. Has Toshiba considered the life cycle of all of its own products before professing expertise on others?
• What do the thousands of men and women employed by Toshiba to manufacture, sell and distribute copiers, printers and toner cartridges world-wide think about this campaign?

Two Sides openly challenges Toshiba’s claims and would like to understand if Toshiba have taken into account verifiable and accurate environmental facts about print and paper in a multi-media world.

Before withdrawing this flawed campaign Toshiba should consider the plethora of accredited facts on the Two Sides Website: www.twosides.info including:
• Since 1950 Forests in Western Europe have increased by 30 per cent. (3)
• European forests are increasing by 1.5 million football pitches every year – an area four times the size of London. (4)

Two Sides promotes print and paper as a versatile, sustainable communications medium. We do not usually comment on the comparative environmental performance of other industries but we cannot let this unwarranted attack on our industry go unanswered.

We look forward to Toshiba’s response.

(1)Greenpeace, The E-waste Problem 2009
(2) The European Declaration on Paper Recycling 2006 – 2010 Monitoring Report 2010
(3) UNECE, FAO, The Development of Forest Resources, 1950 to 2000
(4) CEPI, Forest Fact Sheet, July 2008

Two Sides is a worldwide initiative by companies from the Graphic Communication Value Chain including forestry, pulp, paper, inks and chemicals, pre-press, press, finishing, publishing and printing. Our common goal is to promote the responsible production and use of print and paper, and dispel common environmental misconceptions by providing users with verifiable information on why print and paper is an attractive, practical and sustainable communications medium.

Visit: www.twosides.info to learn lots more.

Source:  http://www.graphicrepro.co.za/asp/news_long.asp?nid=20041

The post Two Sides challenges Toshiba’s ‘No Print Day’ as Greenwash first appeared on The Paper Story (PAMSA).