Greener print design at a glance:

• The print design challenge
• A different kind print design
• Re-nourish recommendations for greener print design
• A deeper look at paper, printing, and ink

Without most us even realizing it, print design has been traveling an unsustainable path for years, relying heavily on virgin wood fiber and toxic manufacturing processes. This path seemed to make good business sense because it cost less, and it was easily accessible. But the pulp and paper industry is now the fourth largest industrial polluter in the United States; paper takes up 26% of our country's landfills, and uses 40% of the world's wood harvest. (source: Green Press Initiative)

It's pretty clear by now that the real costs of remaining on this path are just too high.

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More and more, though, print designers are taking small steps along a new, more sustainable path. We're discovering that small changes become large when multiplied by thousands of other designers making similar decisions.

Need an example? Given a typically tight budget to produce a catalog, two University of Illinois design students assumed that recycled paper would be cost prohibitive. But using the Re-nourish Project Calculator, they discovered that if they trimmed just 1/4" off the book height they would save around 1,000 press sheets. This saved them $3,000, allowing them to specify a high quality, 100% recycled, FSC-certified paper. With a little design thinking, they saved 9,717 gallons of water, 13 million BTUs of energy, 942 pounds of solid waste and avoided 2,255 pounds of greenhouse gases. Now imagine what you could do with the right tools.

These are the small changes we're asking you to make when designing for print: run your project through the calculator. Choose a greener printer or a greener paper. Take a stroll using the full sustainable design roadmap as your guide, and see where it takes you.

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This roadmap sets a course for sustainable print projects. Incorporating even one or two of the following ideas into your next piece will put you on a greener path.

• Reduce the amount of paper and other materials used overall by designing smaller pieces.
• Reduce wasted paper and other materials through clear decision-making during production.
• Replace wood fiber papers with agri-fiber papers when doing so is regionally and environmentally preferable.
• Aim for 100% post-consumer waste (PCW) recycled content paper.
• Choose paper manufactured using renewable energy, or offset by legitimate renewable energy credit programs (such as Green-e; see glossary).
• Select a greener printer for production (search the printer finder).
• Use vegetable-based, low-VOC inks on press.
• Stick to digital printing for shorter runs.
• Avoid additives or excess finishing like foil stamps, varnishes, and laminates.
• Design the piece for extended use, or intentional reuse.
• Include verifiable information about the environmentally aware aspects of the piece.

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Interested in going further? Be sure to explore our greener paper, greener printing, and greener ink pages, where you'll find in-depth information about the impacts of the printing process, and detailed solutions for every step of your project.

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