Printing News

We recently received the following article in an email from Four Colour Print Group, a company with whom the museum has done printing business for years. It gives a nice overview of some environmental concerns with regard to printing.

FSC vs. recycled paper: What is best choice for environment?

Nearly all printers, publishers, and consumers support the idea of making books more environmentally friendly. One hotly debated topic is the question of whether recycled paper is really more environmentally friendly than virgin paper. The complex answer depends on the kind of paper and the purpose for which it's used. Newsprint, packing cartons, and brown bags fall into a different category than the coated white paper used to print a full color book.

While saving trees comes first to mind when thinking about recycling paper, there are other factors to be considered: energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste generation (including the sludge from de-inking), and utilization of valuable human labor. Economists suggest that the higher price of recycled paper is evidence that more of the world's scarce resources are being consumed. Others counter that the full environmental impacts aren't figured into paper prices, i.e. the current market price does not reflect all the long term costs.

Already, over 50% of all paper made in the USA is recovered for recycling. But contrary to popular belief, the key environmental benefit lies not in saving trees, which are truly a renewable resource. Rather, reduction in the amount of solid waste destined for landfills and conservation of energy used in obtaining paper fiber matter more.

Interestingly, whereas virgin paper manufacturing depends primarily on greenhouse gas neutral hydro and biofuel (wood-waste) energy sources, the collection, transportation, cleansing, and processing of recycled paper relies heavily on fossil fuel consumption leading to increased greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, there is far more solid waste generated by recycling (ink, fillers, degraded fibers, and contaminants) than the virgin process, which utilizes 100% of the entire tree and reuses 95% of the pulping chemicals.

While adding recycled fiber to low grade paper products makes economic and environmental good sense, it would be a mistake to assume that higher levels of PCW to every product will necessarily benefit the environment. In fact, the National Energy Education Development Project (www.need.org) found there are no savings in net energy consumption for recycled vs. virgin paper.

In particular, high-quality coated white paper suffers a steep diminishing marginal return from employing recycled fiber, to the point where using virgin fiber is indeed the more environmentally friendly choice. Good policy lies in protecting our old growth forests and avoiding clear cutting of trees. In forests where we do take selective cuts, we must plant new seedlings for all the trees harvested and let the sun, rain, & soil do their job. But how can we assure this happens?

The Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) was created in 1993 to promote the responsible management of the world's forests. Products carrying the FSC label are independently certified to assure consumers that they come from forests that are managed to meet the social, economic and ecological needs of present and future generations. To assure the chain-of-custody of FSC fiber in books from forest to store, loggers, paper makers, and printers are required to undergo a rigorous certification process. A similar organization, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) also provides certification of responsible logging practices.

Customers of Four Colour Print Group will be happy to know that both our printing partners in China and Korea are among a select few who have been FSC certified, and the Sappi paper we use when printing books in the USA is SFI certified. The supply of FSC/SFI paper (including softcover artboard and hardcover caseboard) is growing quickly, and available at only slightly higher prices. For illustrated book publishers wishing to demonstrate concern for the environment (while keeping print costs low), please specify FSC/SFI certified paper. Your printer will provide the appropriate logo for you to proudly display on your book cover.

The museum has not gone the FSC route yet on any of its printed products, but it's certainly something we have been considering, and while we have not found an affordable recycled sheet that matches the color reproduction quality of a virgin sheet, we're trying to move in that direction as well. We do print our newsletter and many of our other materials on Mohawk Via, which is produced using windpower, something Mohawk is very proud of, and we have a meeting today with our local Mohawk sales rep, at which we may learn more.