Milan in May can be perfect. The weather is clement, the heat and dust of a major European city has not built to the point of being insufferable. It is a good place to stage an exhibition or conference: there are plenty of flights and hotels, the transport system is good and the after hours excellent. And this year there was Covid-19, which meant instead of a couple of hundred people attending the Print4All conference spread over a leisurely two days, the event became online, drawing an audience five or six times larger. Everything was crammed into a single day, albeit with a two-hour break for lunch.
The organisers had stuck with live presentations, mixing those able to get to the studio in Milan and those linking up from home to provide their perspective on trends in the industry and trends in society that are likely to impact on the industry – the environment, sustainability and climate change, for example.
And of course the impact of Covid reared its head. Intergraf general secretary Beatrice Klose delivered a broader perspective through her position as the head of the organisation for printing federations across Europe.
“Across Europe companies have delayed planned advertising campaigns by three to six months. The commercial print sector is down 17%, packaging down 3%,” she said. The lockdown period had changed consumer behaviour. They were now prepared to pay for health benefits and for sustainability. “Print is extremely well placed to be part of this trend,” she said.
Specific insights from the UK, India and the US backed this up linking, home offices via the internet. Under the pandemic we really are all in this together. The situation will not last forever. Even if the virus persists, businesses and the economy will adapt to cope. And they are doing so with the sustainability issue. This came through as a strong theme.
Nigel Tapper, environmental scientist at Monash University in Australia, was kept from his bed to provide an overview and the bigger perspective of why society has to change, as well as offering optimism that it can. “There is no question that humans are having a massive impact on the globe, partly the result of the growth of population,” he said. The imperative, he explained, is “meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Thus there were core principles to achieving this goal: an intergenerational equity; biological diversity; precaution not to take unnecessary risks with the environment; a costing system that recognises that we must pay for what we do. The latter is inline with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
And the pandemic has a two pronged impact: consumption of fossil fuel energy has plummeted, but it has increased poverty through the loss of jobs, disruption to education and health and well being. On the other hand work from home is having benefits and nature is returning to cities where air quality has improved.
What this means in terms of print and packaging followed. Massimo Medugno, from Italy’s paper makers federation, pointed to developments in the circular economy and increasing connectivity along the supply chain as indicative of greater thinking about sustainability. “We are using Industry 4.0 to its maximum,” he said, to connect between mills and brands. “And people are using less plastic, more paper.”
There is a need for traceability to track the source of the raw materials used to ensure compliance with protocols. “This has repercussions on packaging design and how to build new machines for packaging,” he adds.
The balance needs to be struck between lightweighting the boxes while also increasing the proportion of recycled content which may not be as strong; between purchases from shops and those made online.
Giacomo Canali from food producer Barilla, one of the largest in Italy, joined the discussion in the studio. “There are two purposes to packaging: it protects food products and provides a longer shelf life and secondly, it delivers assurance that the product is what it says.
“We are guided by several principles: reduce the quantity of material used in packaging, use recyclable materials, recognise forest management and use renewable sources that are not competing for food.”
It means using one material where possible to make recycling or reuse easier. “And as a next step we would like to replace plastic with paper. At the moment some products must use plastics for security issues. Plastics are very efficient: for similar quantities of plastic you can achieve higher barrier protection.”
Another problem with plastic is the end of life chain, what happens when it reaches bins and the difficulty of splitting waste streams into different material types. This is how Corepla’s Luca Stramore kicked off a presentation, continuing the theme. “Companies need to use a lifecycle analysis approach, which means that they must measure different things – not just the environmental impact, but also the social and economic impact.”
The importance of life cycle analysis was brought up later in the afternoon when a panel of industry suppliers took the stage. One was Francesco Crotti, country manager from HP. “We have a specific programme to recycle consumables and supplies that we get back from customers, and to make sure products are upgradeable. We are putting R&D effort into making it easier to recycle, into de-inking paper and other substrates that are certified to be completely environmentally recyclable.
“If we want to succeed on the printing market we need to have people that are really open to work with us as a partner to find the way forward and to unlock new business opportunities.” One of these is around book of one production using variable data printing.
This would not be enough for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Started by the solo round the world sailor after seeing the amount of waste in the otherwise empty oceans, it is focused on working with businesses to drive out this waste. It has picked up signatures from a number of major companies pledged to support these aims, David S Smith among them.
This will need fundamental change, according to Alice Bodreau. “For 92% of the time, a private car is static. There is a huge mismatch between the mobility system and the way we use it. A car is designed to carry five people, yet most of the time carries only one to two.”
There were other examples of profligacy that can end up causing environmental damage. “We have to rethink the whole system and how we produce things at the design stage. We have to design out waste so that we can keep materials in use for as long as possible, which means that products have to be of a higher quality in the first instance. And thirdly, we have to reuse and recycle what is used.”
Hand in hand with the awareness of the need for sustainability across the economy, comes the smart factory, the future factory, Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, to enable companies to control what is produced with greater precision, maximum effectiveness and to eliminate waste at the point of production.
The Italians have been instrumental in setting up one of the first Industry 4.0 supply chains. Andrea Brigante, from Acimga, the federation of equipment suppliers in Italy explained “this is a really important project: it’s about getting companies talking to each other about more than just the products they sell.”
The first feedback is that there is a real need to educate and train staff to understand what the change is all about. Vincenzo Baglieri, Bocconi University, has been instrumental in what has become the Printing 4.0 project.
He recalled an early effort of achieving the “extreme connectivity” that underpins Industry 4.0, when Ariston pulled the plug on its project a few years ago because “the socket needed to run the data transfer was more expensive than the washing machine.”
The always on connectivity leads to huge amounts of transparency that many businesses are unused to. But the result will be timeliness in that the customer receives products when they are needed. Collaboration will stop the jerky stop start traffic jam effect, smoothing out the tendency to jumpiness from an inefficient flow of information.
In Italy the first step has been to call for volunteers willing to participate in the project and for these businesses to be assessed to see if the skills are in place. They were not, creating a demand for training on the shop floor and among the leadership of a business. Testing has shown up more training is needed and the areas where the issues that need addressing lie.
In short, it is early days, both for the circular economy and the connected economy. Both, however, are inevitable and need to be understood. Print4All’s dabble in digital events has worked. Its mix of professional broadcast quality from the television studio in Milan and work from home laptops, delivered in terms of content, and with 1200 participants, delivered for the organisers.
There will be another Print4All conference in May next year, followed the following year by a second edition of the exhibition and conference. This had been due to take place in 2021, but as it became scheduled for just a few weeks after Drupa, it was not a hard deision to slip the dates for the exhibition to May the following year. Brigante drew this year’s event to a close by looking forwards to next year and what lies ahead, saying “the Print4All conference marks a turning point, looking at the future towards an increasingly sustainable supply chain more and more integrated into the 4.0 paradigm.”
Under the chairmanship of television journalist Matteo Bordone, the Print4All conference delivered a deft mix of virtual and real with speakers spread around the globe.
