The BPIF is on the verge of unveiling a four step environmental road map to help printers gain the sustainability spurs that customers are increasingly looking for.
“The environment is an opportunity for print,” BPIF chief executive Charles Jarrold said during his presentation to the Print Power online conference last week. “We will be publishing the road map in two or three weeks’ time.”
He had already explained how print had come through the pandemic period, if not unscathed, at least in a position to recover. “The sector has weathered the challenges pretty well and there’s strong recovery.”
Print had suffered a 40% drop in turnover with the first lockdown, which was double the impact of the previous recession. “At this time last year, the sector was 20% down in terms of turnover. Now we are up 20-25% year on year and we are definitely coming out of the process,” he added.
It is not plain sailing: “The big concern now is cost increases, especially paper price increases, but there are increases across the board.”
Brexit was no longer one of the top three concerns for printers, according to the federation’s Printing Outlook survey, but Brexit is partly to blame for the shortage of skilled labour which is one of the major concerns, because there has been a reduction in people moving from the EU.
Data from the Office of National Statistics shows that UK print has dropped from revenue of £14.6 billion annually to £12.6 billion, employing 105,000 across 7,300 registered companies. This is also reduced by the effects of Covid-19.
For the second year in a row, the Print Power event was staged as an online event, but because of this it had attracted 730 registrations “from all four corners of the world, including Brazil, Australia and Singapore as well as Europe and North America”, Jonathan Tame explained when opening proceedings. As managing director of Two Sides, he also closed the event with an update on activities of the paper advocacy group.
“There continues to be a lot of misleading information and messages which are particularly damaging to consumer confidence and the perception of our industry”, Tame said.
It is Two Sides’ role to challenge these perceptions and promote the use of paper. To this end Tame highlighted the survey conducted earlier this year into how reading habits had been affected by lockdowns across Europe. It showed that there was plenty of work to do: “64% believe forests in Europe are diminishing compared to 10% who rightly understand that forests are increasing, while only 16% understand we recycle more than 60% of paper products – the figure is 74% for paper and 83% for paper based packaging,” he said.
Like the BPIF, Two Sides is on the verge of publicating a new report, in this case its latest Myths and Facts booklet. This will be launched this week and will furnish advocates for print with up to date statistics and data for publishers and brands looking for this information, with Tame adding “unlike Wikipedia”.
