The carbon footprint and environmental impact of print is a hot topic. Being physical, tactile and always present, the assumption is that print must have a more detrimental impact on the environment than email, WhatsApp, Instant Messenger, Facebook, Instagram et al. And because paper is made from wood pulp, print is fingered for destroying rain forests, for laying waste to fragile ecologies and soaking up vast amounts of energy. In short, print is, if not terminally bad, not as good as cleaner more digital means of communication, ie the digital channels.
This is the sort of misconception that Two Sides was set up to correct and it has been successful in tackling companies that attach inaccurate statements to invoices and other literature when their aim is persuade customers away from print. Since its outset in 2010, Two Sides has convinced 970 organisations to remove misleading statements about the poor impact of print compared to the zero impact of digital communications.
But digital channels have their own impact. Read emails and messages on a phone and you pay for the privilege though electricity to charge the device – which is rarely used just for reading in any case. Emails can be considered to have such a tiny impact that it is scarcely worth the mention. The figure most frequently attributed to an email is 4g of carbon for each simple communication. This is derived from a finger in the air assessment by Mike Berners-Lee in a book published more than ten years ago. He went further: the impact might range from 0.03g to 26g depending on attachments and length of the message, the lower figure referring to spam that is sent but caught by filters before it can be read.
Unlike print where the carbon impact finishes on delivery, an email may be read several times, each time clocking up further impacts.
And those micro impacts add up. The ease of communicating via email means very many more are sent out than would be letters, amounting to thousands a day for many workers. The average officer worker can accumulate 1652g of CO2e from a daily dose of email.
Berners-Lee calculated that email accounted for 0.3% of the world carbon footprint. That was before the smart phone became ubiquitous, before new messaging services, streaming, and online games. These all require massive server farms to host the data. And data about these server farms is very limited. The best estimates come to between 3.6% of electricity globally and responsible for 1.4% of global carbon emissions. Little wonder then that the mega corporations like Apple, Amazon etc that operate the data centres are working furiously to power them from renewable energy frequently generated at source, wind and solar being the most popular.
Data centres can account for 25% of the impact of ICT, a similar amount to delivering those messages, while 50% originates from connected devices, from phones to computers and television sets.
A Swedish study by tech company SeenThis calculates that for every gigabyte of digital data transferred, 1kg of carbon is released. That comes from websites as much as from emails.
A news website will include content that has to be called from multiple other servers around the world, compiled into the requested page and delivered to the reader’s eyeballs. Take the PrintBusiness.co.uk website. There is no advertising, so there are no requests to other host servers to pull down a banner ad. Thus every page read will result in the emission of 0.33g CO2e. This is better than 64% of webpages tested, says WebsiteCarbon.com. A web page from a similar industry website where banner advertising is frequent and the result is a carbon impact of 0.99g CO2e and a message that “this web page is dirtier than 75% of all web pages tested”.
Move to a newspaper site where there are not only banner ads to contend with but also the annoying clickbait content, video and a huge number of images. The reader does not want these messages but is paying for them in data charges and unwanted carbon impacts.
The Swedish study estimates that an advertising campaign for a global brand purchasing 40 billion impressions of programmatic advertising will generate 8,000 tonnes of CO2e in a year. Data transfer it says is growing 40% a year, amounting to a 40x increase by 2030. This is the year that many in print have pledged is a target date to be carbon neutral at worst, carbon zero at best.
Households wishing to reduce their carbon impacts should focus elsewhere, not on cutting back on print because of inaccurate perceptions about print’s lack of sustainability.
Each UK citizen is reckoned to have a carbon footprint of 12.7 tonnes CO2e a year, though different measurements result in different figures. Carbon Independent puts the UK figure at 10 tonnes, excluding impacts from aviation, but including a figure for imports. Territorial CO2e per head, ie generated in this country is 7 tonnes. The overall figure for the UK is 405.5 million tonnes a year. This is down 9.5% on 2019, showing the effects of Covid on the economy particularly on transport and 49.7% lower than 1990 led by the switch from coal fired electricity generation to gas.
The UK 7 tonnes per capita figure is among the best in the G20 where Australians have a 21 tonnes per capita footprint, Canadians 19.5 tonnes, Saudis 18 tonnes and the US 17.5 tonnes. In Europe France and Italy’s population account for 6 tonnes each, Germany’s 9.5 tonnes.
Very little of this is accounted for by print. The World Wildlife Fund reckons 84% of the UK’s carbon comes from energy, transport and buildings. The most effective measures to reduce impacts focus on these: replacing petrol with electric engines in cars, insulation in buildings. Changes to diet, dropping red meat, for example, will have a greater impact than dropping magazines. Unfortunately for print, it is easier to stop buying magazines than it is to load dishwashers and washing machines to capacity before switching them on rather than running the machines whenever they want.
While Print Power tries to highlight this in some of its messaging and at its annual conference, the message about sustainability gets lost in communications and presentations about the effectiveness of direct mail for brands and charities. By contrast, in Germany, Ralf Dittman, CEO of WKS, has been explaining the carbon impact of print to all manner of seminars and conferences this year without abrogating print’s responsibility to become carbon neutral.
Many businesses are doing so, working with the likes of CarbonQuota to measure, reduce and then offset any unavoidable impacts. It is working with publishers, big brands and retailers to put a carbon figure on all manner of printed items. Books, greetings cards, direct mail and magazines could within a couple of years be carrying a logo and a figure for the calculated and verified value of carbon included.
Demand for these auditing services are on the rise because every business wants to be able to demonstrate that it is doing its bit to keep within the 1.5ºC temperature rise and to be carbon zero by 2050. This is having its own impact.
Printers face a number of choices about which umbrella scheme to join and what might be the different criteria applied. All should be equally rigorous in demanding evidence about claims of reduction in carbon use, reduction in waste and so on. EcoVadis is becoming popular for example and ranks companies according to how they fare compared to others. Its Platinum ranking applies to the top 1% of those assessed, Gold to the top 4% and so on.
The BCorps scheme is still more rigorous and has an element of corporate purpose that may not suit all businesses and certainly helps younger companies rather than long established businesses. Some companies have changed their titles of memorandum as a result.
Science Based Targets initiative is attracting increasing interest with a number of UK printers pledging action to help the UK to reach 1.5ºC fall in global temperatures. A lot will depend on the customer base. Science Based Targets seems popular among book publishers, so it is no surprise that book printers Clays and CPI have signed up. Look to where customers are and therefore what they expect from their suppliers. Environmental improvement is about partnership and understanding.
Care is also needed to ensure that the choices do not get exposed at a later date. Some offsetting schemes have not been as effective as claimed, some involved double counting and some forestry projects can at best be described as inappropriate for the location.
The Science Based Targets initiative, for example, which an increasing number of printers are signing up to, to go a step further than joining Premier Paper’s Carbon Capture scheme or Carbon Balanced Paper from Antalis and Denmaur. However, the organisation has come in for criticism with some climate scientists claiming that SBTi allowed companies to present flawed data according to a report in the Financial Times because the steps it takes to verify data are not disclosed, many of which can be explained by the speed at which demand for its services is growing.
This can lead to accusations of greenwashing and leads to a lack of confidence in certification schemes. And then to schemes which seek to validate the certifications. The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity initiative was launched in the middle of this year to do precisely this. It has established a provisional code which will end up with gold, silver and bronze ratings against a range of criteria. It has the backing of the UK Government and is currently running a number of pilot programmes with longer term visions of using the provisional code as the basis of future legislation.
The greenwashing problem, where corporates state their support for sustainability but do little if anything to change their behaviour, was highlighted at the Cop27 conference in Egypt. A report from the UN set to draw a red line around false claims. It set out rules to be followed to ensure that the claims are credible and dismisses the use of cheap carbon credits as a means of achieving net zero targets. Offsetting is becoming big business, but also increasingly questioned. Schemes need to be robust and accompanied by action to reduce carbon impacts at source.
Dominic Harris at CarbonQuota can cite examples where businesses have made sustainability claims and are now having to stand these up with quantifiable and verifiable scientifically valid data. “Carbon Neutral now has a clear definition,” he says.
This can only be good for those printers that can demonstrate exactly what action they are taking backed by the figures to give customers the assurance that they are protected against unwanted exposure.
On the other hand greenwashing persists. While Two Sides has been successful in persuading 970 organisations to remove false claims, it had approached more than 2,000 businesses. Chief executive Jonathan Tame says Two Sides is needed as much as ever despite the greater call for science based evidence: “It remains vital that greenwash is challenged to ensure that the industry’s great environmental record is recognised and that the livelihoods of thousands of industry employees, as well as print, paper and postage volumes, are not damaged by the spread of misleading and opportunistic greenwash marketing,” Tame says.
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