Printing is a transport business too

Printing always will be an industry based on the physical movement of goods, and primarily it uses road transport. Rising fuel prices mean this is getting ever more expensive, even without the guilt trip of global warming to consider. Crude oil prices have tripled in the past couple of years, largely because of demand from China. This hasn’t led to tripling of prices at the forecourts because refinery and tax costs form the majority of the retail prices. However average UK petrol prices have just hit £1 per litre due to a combination of a Government tax hike plus City speculation. Prices may fall temporarily but they’ll soon rise again. Running an energy-efficient and possibly carbonneutral printing business isn’t just about recycled paper and long-life light bulbs, it means cutting down on the energy consumption of transport too. This should have the benefit of reducing costs, though it’s not guaranteed: in some cases you’ll need to buy new vehicles or technologies, which costs money and many not be as ‘green’ as keeping old ones on the road.

The best way to cut fuel costs is to make fewer journeys. In that respect the printing industry can hold its head up. Since the early 1990s the introduction of electronic artwork delivery, digital cameras and digital soft proofs have cut the need for physical delivery runs in pre-press. Digital printing has never needed the film, chemistry and plate consumables of offset or flexo. Nevertheless, you’ll always need to transport blank paper, ink/toner and other media and consumables in from suppliers, and then deliver printed finished goods to customers.

Suppliers usually take care of the goods inward transport. For instance paper supplier James McNaughton Group is a keen supporter of environmental issues and has implemented a campaign to reduce road miles through its logistics company GM2. It’s been able cut its fleet by 36 vehicles to 72, knock more than a million miles off their usage, reduce diesel consumption by 114,000 gallons, and reduce its CO2 emissions by 975 tonnes. It’s using electric trucks for around-London deliveries, recharged by ‘green’ energy from wind farms. GPS software is used to plan fuel-efficient routes, and third party deliveries are taken to fill spare capacity on journeys.

Printers often need local delivery vans, though increasingly everyone uses couriers for out-of-area deliveries. However, if you do run your own long-range delivery fleet, this too could benefit from new economy- boosting technology.

For example DAF is starting UK operator trials with seven hybrid trucks in the spring. Renault Trucks already offers vehicles that can run on bio-diesel, natural gas, diesel/electric, and wholly electric, and has just shown Hybris, a concept truck dubbed a ‘vision of urban transport for the future.’ Volvo showed a prototype hybrid heavy truck last year, a relatively small diesel motor plus an electric motor to aid acceleration. It claims fuel savings of 35% with reduced emissions and noise, but says it’s a longterm project that needs a future battery technology to be worthwhile.

Mercedes’ truck division isn’t too convinced about hybrids, arguing that extra weight tends to cancel out extra economy, and so it’s concentrating on more efficient diesels, with biofuel options. FedEx is about to try a handful of hybrid Iveco Daily vans in Italy, though Iveco agrees with Mercedes that commercially viable models are a few years away. Electric delivery vehicles have been around for years, mainly in the form of the familiar, very slow milk vans. A new generation of electric trucks is appearing that can keep up with in-town traffic and offer better ranges. They’re recharged from the mains and users can opt for low-carbon electricity suppliers. There’s no road tax, congestion charge or operator’s license. Examples are the very compact Mega electric truck, with a smallish load area, a payload of 335 kg for a 40- 60 mile range between charges, or 445 kg for 25-35 miles. Smith Electric Vehicles’ Edison is a 3.5 tonne van with a 1.4 tonne payload and a claimed 150 mile range. It’s based on a Ford Transit chassis. The larger 5.5 tonne Modec truck (shown in our illustration) has a 2 tonne payload. It’s built in Coventry. Largest so far is the 9 tonne Newton, built by Smith Electric Vehicles for courier DHL, with a 100 mile range and 50 mph top speed.

There are three major strands of vehicle efficiency development. One is to carry on using fossil fuels, but reduce consumption by making today’s cars and trucks far more fuel-efficient. Another is to replace some or all of the fossil fuels with biofuels made from specially crown crops. Both of these are starting to happen and can cut costs, but they only reduce or postpone the underlying problem rather than solving it.

The third strand is to switch to a completely different fuel (hydrogen being favoured though it’s not perfect) or to all-electric vehicles that tap into renewable power generators such as wind, wave, solar or, er, nuclear (a non-carbon solution that makes greenies go puce). Today’s batteries means that all-electric cars just don’t have the range to be practical except for local use. Until recently, the best way to get economy was to drive a diesel car or truck rather than using petrol. Favourable taxation has also meant that an LPG (liquid petroleum gas) or CNG (compressed natural gas) conversions make sense for high mileage drivers, but these use fossil fuel so they won’t save the planet.

The introduction of sliding scales for the UK Road Fund License based on average CO2 emissions in terms of grams per kilometre seems to have concentrated manufacturers’ attention. For Band A (below 100 g/km) you don’t pay anything, and for Band B (from 101 to 120 g/km) you only pay £35 pa. With Band C (121 to 150 g/km) the fund jumps to £115 and thereafter in progressive steps up to £300 for real gas-guzzlers. The London Congestion Charge body, Transport For London, seems likely to adopt similar scales, and is proposing that low-emitters will get in free and the real gluttons will pay up to £25 per day. Although not officially announced yet, it’s possible that Band B as well as Band A cars will get in free.

The sub-100 g/km Band A is hard for car manufacturers to achieve except for all-electric vehicles and really stripped-down economy models. The only allelectric cars sold in the UK today are the tiny, two seat and rather flimsy Reva G-Wiz and Mega City, with tops speeds around 40 mph and ranges of around 50 miles per charge. They’re mainly seen around London, where they don’t pay the congestion charge and can park free in some places.

Volkswagen is the only manufacturer so far to get a ‘real’ car into Band A – it’s the 99 g/km Polo BlueMotion, a three door 1.3 litre diesel model with tweaked aerodynamics, gearing and tyres that let it average about 72 mpg and still get decent on-road performance. However, if global warming means you want the air conditioning option, this takes it into Band B with 104 g/km so you’ll have to cough up £35. Motoring mags point out that the Polo BlueMotion is about £2,000 dearer than conventional 50-ish mpg Band B rivals, which would pay for a lot of fuel. Despite their claims of ultra-efficiency, Honda’s Civic Hybrid and Toyota’s hybrid Prius are also in the £35 Band B, though they’re larger and roomier than the Polo and include air-con as standard.

A new crop of perfectly practical, conventional and even slightly sporting models is appearing that amazingly emit exactly 119 g/km, so they just scrape into £35 Band B. You can even keep your reps happy with a BMW: the latest 1-series 118d is classed at 119 g. The Mini Cooper D diesel, with the same engine, hits 104 g. In addition to using less petrol or diesel, there’s another option: use a fuel that’s extracted from crops. Plants grow by extracting carbon dioxide from the air, so if you burn them as fuel you’re only returning carbon that was there to start with. That’s the theory anyway: reality is slightly hazier. Biodiesel or bioethanol (petrol equivalent) fuels are available today already. Politicians control the price - currently a litre of 100% biodiesel recycled from chip shops (honestly) only costs about 25p to make, but our government imposes a 28p tax.

Most commercially available biofuels are actually a blend of a small amount of crop-based fuel into ordinary fossil fuel, so standard engines don’t need major modification to run them. The ‘bio’ proportion is between 5% and 15%, so the fuel isn’t very green after all. Actually if biofuels really take off, they won’t save the planet at all. With today’s technology some environmentalists have calculated that you’d have to turn practically the whole planet over to biofuel crops to replace current petrol/diesel usage. This would mean environmental disaster, economic chaos and general starvation. Honda has taken a different track. Last month it announced FCX Clarity, the world’s first commercially available fuel cell vehicle. It showed a concept two years ago but says it will deliver the real thing in the summer of 2008. This is many years before most pundits thought that fuel cell vehicles were possible. It’ll only be available for leasing (three years at £300 per month), a tactic used with earlier semi-experimental vehicles and suggesting that it’s essentially a public Beta test.

FCX Clarity is a large four-door saloon with radical styling, as shown in our illustration here. The fuel cell provides electrical power for three motors: one in the front and two at the back. On the road the only emission is water vapour. The drawback is that it needs a tank full of liquid hydrogen to power the fuel cell, which has to be expensively extracted from natural gas (back to fossil fuel) or split from water by lots of electricity. Honda will initially only deliver the FCX Clarity in Japan and Southern California, where there’s a handful of hydrogen filling stations already (BMW and a few others have already made tiny numbers of cars with conventional engines that burn liquid hydrogen instead of petrol).

Honda’s longer-term solution is to offer a home hydrogen plant, running on natural gas and heating your home and water as a byproduct. It’s obviously still dependent on fossil fuel and mains electrical power, but it’s apparently relatively efficient. Whatever the technology, it’s clear that passenger cars are essential for making sales calls, whatever your size of business. Only the most committed environmentalist is going to hand out bikes and railcards to sales staff.

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