| Sponsor | On June 19, Don Carli will be the keynote speaker at the "Sustainability in Printing" Conference in Philadelphia. Don will address "Going Green - A Printing and Publishing Market Overview."
This Conference will be presented by IntertechPira.
SustainCommWorld is pleased to announce that Pira will be presenting 2 workshops as part of The Green Media Show pre-conference education offerings in Boston on Spetember 30. More information to come.
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Let us send you information about the next SustainCommWorld event
The Green Media Show
Boston, October 1 and 2
 | | Quick Links | The Exploding Digital Universe
The sustainability challenge for digital communications significantly exceeds print. EMC has an excellent tool that demonstrates how fast our digital universe is growing. This growth has an energy burden that may exceed our ability to support in the near term and could present significant challenges to an increasingly digitally-based business environment.
In addition, EMC has an excellent green paper, "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe" written by IDC for the digital storage company.
Click here for the EMC sponsored paper
| | | | Greetings! |  At this time of political campaigning that seems to have gone on forever, I thought you might be interested in some numbers relating to the cost of a campaign (think marketing campaign, think any candidate) from a sustianable communications perspective.
A typical day on the road: Barack Obama and his entourage travel from Columbus, Ohio, to Des Moines, Iowa, and then to Washington, D.C.
Miles driven: 123, Vehicles: 6 Chevy Suburbans (14 mpg) and 2 Crown Victoria patrol cars (16 mpg) CO2 emissions: 0.7 tons
Miles flown: 1,679 - Aircraft: Challenger 600 (1.5 mpg) CO2 emissions: 11.8 tons
Town-hall event in Iowa - CO2 emissions: 10.3 tons
Total CO2 emissions: 22.8 tons - Cost to offset: $83 to $206
Environmental oversight: What's not counted when campaigns buy carbon offsets?
Printing 10,000 bumper stickers = 1.6 tons of CO2
Printing a 10,000-piece mailing = 2.1 tons of CO2
Printing 10,000 yard signs = 10.7 tons of CO2
Not even counting the disposal of all those mailing pieces and yard signs...
Source Mother Jones, December '07
You might be interested in what the candidate's have to say on sustainability. In alphbetical order as found on their websites:
Hillary Clinton on Energy and the Environemnt
John McCain on the Environment
Barack Obama on Energy and the Environment
Lisa Wellman, CEO, SustainCommWorld
| | Greening the Media Supply Chain | Issues relating to IT and energy seem to have taken the lion's share of focus of those responsible for sustainability within their organizations. The importance of these areas is undeniable. However, there's a huge opportunity to impact an organization's footprint that's hiding in plain sight.
Consider: corporate communications, advertising. email blasts, websites. webinars, direct mail. Consider the digital assets of any enterprise; graphics, logos, images as well as boilerplate text and the whitepapers, reports, presentations. Add in road shows, seminars and tradeshows and marketing's footprint is substantial.
The impact of all these activities represents an area we have found to be largely overlooked. SustainCommWorld found, In a recent informal survey, less than 10% of the companies we asked had even considered placing their advertising on the basis of the carbon footprint of the publication in addition to the circulation metrics and other considerations. Of course, only a few magazines have calculated the carbon footprint of their advertising pages. Time Inc., The Economist and Discover magazine are those we know about.
CorporateRegister.com reported in February 2008 that environmental and social performance is rating high on the corporate reporting agenda, with two-thirds of Global Fortune 500 companies issuing a standalone non-financial report in 2007. We know the rate of companies of all sizes adding sustainability reporting to their business practices is growing by double digits each year.
New tools are coming to market to enable marketers to make appropriate decisions in their activities and contribute positively to the company metrics. One such tool is the Caron Offset Calculator that imc² working with Jon Koomey of Stanford University and Cody Taylor of ICF International developed. It's called Clear Sky Digital Media and calculates the estimated cost to offset the carbon footprint of an online media campaign. The tool is a first step toward helping marketers identify the environmental impact of their online advertising efforts and how to appropriately offset that impact.
Sun Microsystems is funding research to measure the carbon footprint of individual emails. They are looking at mail servers, the applications used, the network devices and trying to extrapolate the energy used back to the email itself. They acknowledge the need to determine if email is environmentally better than other types of communication.
These tools are critical to providing business communicators with the means to make environmentally responsible decisions.Marketing and its supply chain should not be left off the sustainability metrics tracking of any business. The numbers are just too significant.
| | Consider Greening Your Events | There are great savings to be made by greening your events, be they offsite meetings, tradeshows, road shows, receptions or press functions.
The simplest way to begin is to purchase carbon offsets from renewable energy suppliers to reduce the travel carbon footprint. Your company may have a corporate directive as to which type of organization it supports. If not, there is a wide range of options. Beware of the "cheapest" rate per ton. Look into if it's wind, solar or other like geothermal. A good website to compare various plans is EcoBusinessLinks
Next, review what the venue is doing to be green. Adding a request for their sustainability statement and services to your RFP will yield a wealth of information. If your event is over 6 months out, ask what green improvements are planned and potential completion date. One area that you might want to consider carbon offset for is electrical service and use. There is little one can do about the service a facilities uses, but carbon offsets will set aside any offense. If possible, request energy efficient LED or compact fluorescent lights.
Food service is a significantly substantial area where you can go green. For most activities, renewable and recyclable paper cups are far better than glasses that must be washed. Make sure the facility recycles these items and set out special trash containers for all recyclable materials. Make sure that all unused food is donated to a local charity. Of course, if this is a C-level event, champagne in paper does not cut it for most companies. Again offsets can help out.
Last, but not least, printed materials. Is it really necessary to print mountains of handouts and then ship them across the country? Consider emailing PDFs to all attendees and request they bring their laptop. Or place all materials on a flash drive and hand out in a welcome kit. Even in tradeshow booths, lower the quantity of printed materials shipped to the event. Swipe attendees' badges and email off PDFs of requested materials. Have a system in place in advance and make sure this happens within 48 hours.
These are just a few startup ideas to get you rolling. Do something new each event and make sure you use offsets sparingly. Only then will your events truly turn green.
Kathleen Kaiser, EVP Business Development, SustainCommWorld
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