Not as green as you think...

There are many interesting things to think about when looking at print and IT, including the strange contest taking place of electronic versus printed communication - quite apart from thoughts of ‘Surely they're complementary?' and ‘Isn't there room for both?'.  After all, television did not kill radio; videos and DVDs have not killed cinema - they've just changed the approaches and the way things work. As web-to-print seems to be doing, using the best of both worlds. But something more relevant to this column is what are the environmental pros and cons of web-to-print.

It initially seems very straightforward. When fully embraced, what had been printed on paper becomes electronic in many parts of the workflow: no paper orders or invoices needed, no physical proofs or artwork disks, no cheques to send through the post. Electronic ordering, processing, payment - all saving the need for paper. Transport is reduced - no need to see your friendly rep, send artwork, proofs, orders, invoices or payment through the post or with couriers. All goes down the wire. No envelopes, stamps, polluting motorbikes; reduced mileage for sales reps, reduced loads for the post van.

There are other resource benefits too. Use of online templates reduces the risks of mistakes, so more work will be right first time - saving reworking and the need for reprints after that butterflies in the tummy, whoops! moment when you notice a typo in an element so common to your work that the eye skims over it when proofreading. For those managing brand integrity, it can be a tremendous boon - in a multi-site company, with numerous staff ordering items of stationery or company literature personalised to their site, keeping control of the branding can be challenging, to say the least. Brand manuals are excellent sources of reference, but don't prevent whoever is ordering the business cards or leaflets from changing the layout because they think the logo looks better on the left rather than the right. Fixed templates do prevent this. So there's no need for the logo cops to swoop and remove all the offending items to the recycling bin (shades of my past life coming through here).

What with digital printing becoming ever more popular, faster make-readies on litho presses, and simpler ways of ordering, the need to order extra copies ‘just in case' is also reduced. Perhaps stationery amnesties, when staff are encouraged to clear out the store cupboard with its boxes of out-of-date letterheads, envelopes and business cards, will become a thing of the past. That's not to mention the waste of all the brochures, leaflets and datasheets in the literature store when designs or products, and thus items of literature, are updated when there are still so many of the old versions around, ordered in bulk because it was cheaper to run on a thousand than reprint if you ran out.

So not only are you using less paper but you're saving ink and other consumables by producing shorter runs, as well as saving on all the resources and energy used to make them, and you're saving on the environmental impacts of transporting elements other than the printed job around.

But is it all so clear-cut? After all, data is being processed, stored, moved around. And this still takes energy and material resources. Any questions about environmental impacts tend to produce answers in shades of grey, and this is no exception - it is important to consider the other side of the story as well.

When all my reference material used to be printed material, every now and then I'd run out of storage space and be forced into a massive purge of out-of-date material to make room for the new, which otherwise sits in stacks about the office as the shelves get full. Now much of my reference is electronic and so I have no stacks of paper staring at me, forcing me to be as disciplined with storage on my Mac.  It's just so easy to add memory when my hard drive starts getting full. And it's the same with other data.

The space that data is taking up, especially when it's in the Cloud, is invisible, but it uses energy. And the equipment it sits on uses resources, gets out of date and needs replacing.

Data centres are massive users of energy - according to a report issued by Greenpeace in March 2010, "Data centres to house the explosion of virtual information currently consume 1.5-2% of all global electricity; this is growing at a rate of 12% a year." Global Action Plan's 2007 An Inefficient Truth report placed the worldwide ICT (Information and Communication Technology) sector as being "responsible for around 2% of man made CO2 each year - a similar figure to the global airline industry." The energy and resource considerations also apply to your own IT equipment, so whether you're buying in equipment or outsourcing to the Cloud, there are many elements to consider.

For example, with regards to the energy associated with your own equipment, apart from the obvious measure of checking out the energy efficiency of new hardware, also ensure that energy-saving controls are activated.  When wandering around people's offices, I've noticed that screen-savers are still very much the norm, using energy when the user's away from their desk, unlike settings that put the monitor, and even the computer, to sleep if the keyboard's not being used. And, as mentioned in the last article, turn off everything you can at night and weekends.

If outsourcing to a data centre, or running your own, there are other questions to think about, such as PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and, a more recent measure, CUE (Carbon Usage Effectiveness). Not all data centres are born equal, and PUE measures the ratio of total power consumed by the centre against that going to the IT equipment, the ideal, but as yet impossible, ratio being 1 - all energy being used directly by the IT equipment and none by the infrastructure. Data centres tend to use a lot of energy for cooling. The industry's major players are certainly moving in the right direction, in part through careful siting and use of air cooling and, in part, through use of new technology and pushing the boundaries on operating temperature. The average was stated as 2.5 in Global Action Plan's report back in 2007; Facebook's new state-of-the-art centre in Oregon claims a PUE of 1.07 against a current US average of 1.5. Although large data centres are hungry for power, they do have the expertise and investment to allow them to be more efficient than a small company running its own servers.

But energy consumption is not the total story: energy source is also important, hence the next step forward: CUE - measuring the carbon emissions. This will vary according to energy source, which tends to vary according to country or state, and again, this is becoming a focus for the attention of major players.

Other resources are also important for greening IT: the potential life of the hardware, the materials used, recyclability and so on. The EPEAT website has a handy search tool to help you find what you're looking for, grading environmental performance according to its bronze, silver and gold levels. Details of this, and more information and links to various specialist greening IT websites, are in the ‘Save Money, Save Energy' section of http://www.greenprinter.co.uk/ - along with other more general information to help printers be leaner as well as greener.

So, back to web-to-print: yes, there are a lot of positives here environmentally, but it is important not to forget the invisible areas of data storage and transmission, and to aim to reduce their impacts too. Greenprinter will keep adding resources to help - and you can follow me on Twitter as well: www.twitter.com/GreenprinterUK.