Sustainability still counts
The pressure on costs has diffused the focus on the environment in many businesses. Yet regulators, legislators and publicly quoted companies are becoming more environmentally sensitive. The letter of intent between two industry bodies – DPDA and INGEDE – to investigate the deinking of inkjet printers is timely. Inkjet technology is just below the radar for pressure groups like Greenpeace but with volumes growing, that will change. The ability to take the inkjet print off paper and recycle it is crucial.
And let’s bury this ‘dead tree media’ tag while we’re at it. The IT industry already accounts for 2% of global CO2 emissions and, with the proliferation of tablets and smart phones, that figure must surely rise. However 21st century iPads might seem, they are terribly dated in one profound way: they are designed as if the energy needed to power them is both infinite and cheap. It is neither.
Sweden’s Centre For Sustainable Communications found that reading a newspaper for 30 minutes on a computer can have the same carbon dioxide emissions as reading a printed newspaper.