HP appoints Whitman CEO as Apotheker ousted

HP has confirmed that former eBay head Meg Whitman has been appointed as president and chief executive officer following the departure of Leo Apotheker after just 10 months in the role.

Speculation surrounding Apotheker’s departurehad been rife during the past few days with the HP board reacting following investor criticism of Apotheker’s plan to migrate from hardware to focus on software and services.

Through the shake-up, Ray Lane moves from non-executive chairman to executive chairman of the board of directors, with the board intending to appoint a lead independent director.Lane said the company was “fortunate to have someone of Meg Whitman’s calibre and experience step up to lead HP”.

He added: “We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead.

“Meg is a technology visionary with a proven track record of execution. She is a strong communicator who is customer focused with deep leadership capabilities.”

Replacing Apotheker is proving costly for HP though, with some reports suggesting his departure costing the company as much as $33m (£21.3m).

The move comes shortly after the company’s third quarter results revealed that its printing division added $6.1bn (A$6.2bn) to the IT giant’s $31.2bn net revenues, down 1% year-on-year.

Sales of its commercial presses came in at $1.3bn for the quarter ending 31 July, down 7% year-on-year and 10% sequentially, although hardware units rose 1%, and sales were marginally up for the nine months.

Trading Post returns to print with Fairfax partnership

In a move that appears to be a swing away from the online and back to the increasingly unpopular print medium, the Telstra-owned Trading Post online has partnered with Fairfax Media to allow classified advertisements to appear under both banners.

Under the agreement, general classified advertising packages for Fairfax customers will now include an online presence on Trading Post online, and the classifieds sections of the media group’s 180 regional and metropolitan publications will receive the Trading Post banner head.

The new partnership will see the online classified publisher feature ads from Fairfax on its site, but its online listings will not necessarily appear in print. The Trading Post presence will merely be offered to advertisers as an additional online option.

However, CEO of marketplaces at Fairfax Media, Nic Cola, says that the company is ultimately working towards featuring Trading Post online-generated ads in its publications. These classifieds would be geographically targeted according to region.

The agreement builds upon a classified advertising deal struck between Fairfax and APN News & Media last year that saw the latter feature Fairfax’s online classified advertisement brands Domain, Drive and MyCareer in over 90 APN regional Queensland publications.

The Trading Post has been out of the print market since October 2009 after experiencing diminishing advertising revenue, but the agreement with Fairfax will see it return to the medium it first entered four decades ago.

Cola says that the partnership with the iconic Trading Post brand will allow Fairfax Media’s customers utilize the online channel and have a much greater opportunity to sell their products.

“The deal is designed to add value to our large client base,” says Cola. “Our classified advertisers were asking for a simple online presence. A lot of our clients are after multi-platform solution, customers a more sophisticated now and ask for more than one medium.

“We have over 40,000 listing and we think it will help with our customer retention and attraction. It allows us to get our clients’ ads over a much larger audience.”

The Trading Post banner will be first incorporated into Fairfax’s regional publications and will be followed, over the coming months, by its metropolitan mastheads.

Michael Paddeb, Telstra’s head of advertising network, says “the partnership between Fairfax and tradingpost.com.au ensures classified advertisers will have the best of both worlds, with publications that engage with local communities combined with the extensive reach of Australia’s leading classified website.”

Article courtesy of Print 21 Online

Colour fidelity and correct page order assistance added to Kainos Print web site

We have just added two important updates to the ‘how to prepare  your files’ section of our web site.

For some customers it is critical that the colour is perfect. We have added a detailed section on what to do when this is the case. You can view it by clicking here. We have also written a much more extensive blog on the same subject which you can view by clicking here.

We regularly (too regularly!) come across excellent books which are to some extent spoiled by a poor understanding of how to arrange and paginate preliminary pages — Title Page, Foreword, Table of Contents etc. We have added a detailed section on how to go about setting up the preliminary pages to our ‘how to prepare  your files’ section. We will be writing a more extensive blog on it, but for the time being, view the details here.

Researchers use 3D printer to print blood vessels

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have created blood vessels using the 3D printer.

The team is looking at ways of overcoming barriers to creating tissues and organs in the laboratory for transplanting to people. One of the biggest obstacles is to find a way to manufacture a vascular system to supply nutrients to these laboratory organs.

The 3D printer was used to build a network of blood vessels layer by layer, chemically bonding them by exposing them to UV radiation. Then the finer capillary vessels are created using a two-photon polymerisation process to create a fine elastic structure.

Dr Guntar Tovar who leads the project said that the two manufacturing processes have already proved to function successfully in testing and a combined system is now being built.

“We are establishing a basis for applying rapid prototyping to elastic and organic biomaterials. The vascular systems illustrate very dramatically what opportunities this technology has to offer, but that’s definitely not the only thing possible,” he said.

Creating organs for transplants is still a long way off, but if successful the technology could be used to create artificial vessels for bypass patients and more complex organs to replace animal testing.

The initial results of the project will be on show at the Biotechnica Fair in Hannover, Germany on 11-13 October.

Article courtesy of UK PrintWeek

What to do when the colour of your printed product just HAS to be perfect

When colour fidelity is critical . . .

Be aware that any self respecting printer will ensure presses are regularly calibrated to industry standards. Most printers pride themselves on producing quality, predictable, repeatable colour. From time to time however, customers are surprised that the colour they were expecting is not what they received. If colour fidelity is critical, a number of steps can be taken to increase your chances of getting exactly what you want. For the purposes of this exercise, I will assume you are using a quality printing company with a proven track record.

1. If the job is colour critical, it is a very good idea to ask for hard copy proofs. You will normally have to pay extra for a hard copy proof. If the colour revealed by the proofs is not what you expected you can make adjustments to your files and resubmit them. You can then ask for another hard copy proof, or a PDF proof. Generally speaking, printers will not bind or apply any coating to hard copy proofs as the main purpose of a hard copy proof is to check colour. It is unnecessarily expensive to ask for a hard copy proof if your main concern is the accuracy of the text — you can print out a PDF proof, which will normally cost you nothing — for such purposes.

2. You can provide your printer with hard copy prints prints and ask the printer to match them. In most cases it is possible to tweak the colours on a press to match supplied art work. If it is not possible, then the printer will advise you. Supplying your printer with hard copy prints is perhaps the best way to ensure you get the colour you want.

3. You should always convert files to CMYK from RGB before sending the files to the printer, then check to see if there is any colour shift when making the conversion. You can then go back into the CMYK file and make colour adjustments. For instance, you will sometimes find that deep blues have turned a little purple. You can go a long way towards fixing this in an image editing package such as Adobe PhotoShop. You can can open the image and reduce the amount of magenta, perhaps increase the amount of cyan a smidge, and maybe add some black to restore the depth of colour. When converting from RGB to CMYK, it is very important to use the correct colour profile in the conversion. If you are printing on coated gloss or satin paper, use the profile ‘Coated FOGRA27 (ISO 12647:2:2004)’. Do NOT use any Japanese, US, Uncoated, Newsprint or Web profiles.

4. Computer monitors should be calibrated. This is critical. It used to be a very expensive process, and possible only with hideously expensive monitors, but these days there are a few monitor calibration tools available that are not expensive. One of the best devices is a small piece of equipment called a Colormuki which will do a lot more than calibrate monitors. For instance, you can read the colour off a hard copy print and replicate the colours in your page layout software. Another inexpensive device, although not as capable, is the Pantone Hue PRO

One of the most common problems with uncalibrated monitors has to do with brightness. Most people run their monitors too bright. If an image appears correct on a monitor that is too bright, it will print darker than you expect. Another problem occurs when the contrast between light and dark in the monitor is too great. You might adjust a picture that appears correct on a very contrasty monitor, only to find it reproduces rather dull and flat, without the punch you were after. A calibrated monitor will overcome these problems.

5. When printing out proofs, you should not depend on an inkjet printer for colour accuracy unless you can calibrate it. The chances are your office printer will not have any calibration tools. Calibration is usually carried out by printing a calibration sheet supplied with the printer, and consisting of a great many colour patches. The patches are then read by a colour spectrophotometer connected to the printer, which compares what was printed with what should have been printed by a perfectly calibrated printer. Then any adjustments required are automatically made to the printer. Such facilities are available only on high end printers, and are quite expensive.

6. View your had copy proof in daylight conditions, not in yellow incandescent light. The lighting conditions under which you view your proof can make an amazing difference. Try this experiment. Open a file on your calibrated monitor and compare it with the printed product, printed from the file you are viewing. Firstly, compare the two in daylight viewing conditions, ideally in the middle of the day, ideally on a sunny day, and with the monitor reasonably close to a window with daylight pouring in. Then draw the blinds, turn on incandescent lights if you have them and repeat the process. You will find the printed product look darker and more yellow. If the printing company has done the job correctly, then the hard copy compared to the file viewed on the calibrated monitor under daylight conditions should be almost identical.

Welcome to the new Kainos Print Site

Welcome to our new look Kainos Print site.  The site has undergone extensive redesign and our back end software has been upgraded so that we can offer you more information such as:

  • Latest news from Kainsprint and the printing industry
  • Blog entries

Our new site also allows us to update pages much more easily,  ensuring that the information is refreshed and as up to date as possible.

The Kainos Print team.

All about RGB and CMYK

There are few subjects more likely to confuse people who have little or no knowledge of the printing process than the need to convert from RGB to CMYK. This article and those which will follow are designed to go some way towards overcoming this lack of knowledge.

The essence of the problem is that most of us work most of the time in the RGB colour space, however all printing processes — offset, digital and inkjet for instance, use the CMYK colour space, and it is necessary to convert anything that is to be printed and which is supplied in the RGB colour space to CMYK.

RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. RGB is the colour space used by computer monitors, digital cameras, television sets, and is the default colour space for a good many computer programs including Microsoft Office.

The problem arises because RGB and CMYK have different colour “gamuts”. A colour gamut is the range of colours that a colour space can reproduce. Generally speaking, RGB has a wide colour gamut than CMYK. That is, RGB is capable of reproducing more colours from within the visible colour spectrum (i.e. all the colour range visible to the human eye) than CMYK.

Here are some illustrations that show the differences, which in some cases can be quite dramatic. You need to click on the image to open it, then click again to see the original image uploaded in high resolution and in accurate colour.

The top left hand image shows the drop off in brightness that occurs when converting from RGB to CMYK.

The top right hand image and the middle left hand image show clearly that the CMYK colour space displays less colours from the visual colour spectrum than does the RGB colour space.

The two photos of the rocky hill and the sky show the dramatic difference that occurs when converting from RGB to CMYK. Be sure to click on the images twice to get to the actual image I have uploaded — if you don’t, you won’t see the dramatic difference.

The last photo is of a conventional offset press, clearly showing the four towers, each of which prints one colour, cyan, magenta, yellow or black as the paper passes along the press.

Here are some web sites that explain the differences between RGB and CMYK in more detail.

At http://dx.sheridan.com/advisor/cmyk_color.html there is an excellent illustrated article, in somewhat technical language, and with some further links.

Wikipedia has a few excellent articles. Here is one that describes the word “gamut”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut. Here is another that describes the CMYK colour gamut: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model, and the RGB colour gamut: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space.

I will post more articles in the coming days explaining how to convert from RGB to CMYK.

The demise of Borders and A&R

REDGroup Retail, owner of two of Australia’s largest retail bookselling chains, Borders and Angus & Robertson (which between them account for around 20% of Australian book retailing), was placed in voluntary administration last week. The shockwaves have reverberated throughout the retail community and the business community generally.

Many reasons have been advanced. The three most common of which are that the business was under-financed, that is was badly run, and that the internet is killing retail bookselling — and perhaps retailing in general.

Richard Flanagan, writing in the Melbourne Age on Friday February 19th, observes

The failure of Borders and Angus & Robertson has little to do with online selling and much to do with corporate stupidity and greed.

REDgroup Retail, the owner, was a typical early noughties business, created by a private equity firm, overly indebted, seeking to make up the growing difference between its mounting debt burden and its more humble income by using its businesses to fleece customers and suppliers.

Thus in 2007 came the unedifying and frankly disgusting attempt by Angus & Robertson, bearer of the oldest and one of the proudest names in the history of the Australian book trade, to charge small Australian publishers for simply stocking their books, demanding up to $20,000 to make up for their supposed reduced profitability.

Jack Waterford, former editor of The Canberra Times doesn’t mourn the passing of these two chains, and put some flesh and bones on the claim that these shops have been badly run..

No one can claim absolute pleasure either at the closure of a bookshop or the end of the business and the resulting unemployment and misery, but the imminent demise of Borders leaves me fairly dry-eyed. Borders is, I think, one, if only one, of the reasons why good bookshops have become harder to find in recent years.

The first false impression that a person walking into a Borders, or a shop like it, is that it contains a lot of books. But typically the range of “real” books is very limited, and very narrow, and the overwhelming number of items in the shop are not real books at all. There is row upon row of books about cooking, about travel, personal development, fitness, romance, “manga”, and any number of unreadable failed books available at a massive discount.

But the selection of ordinary fiction, or good non-fiction, is quite limited and generally involves a minimal amount of floor space.

The business model of a Borders seems to regard books as having “use-by dates” — making it, usually, almost impossible to find another book written by a currently successful author, or a book that was quite popular only last year.

This is quite apart from the depressing lack of personality of such shops, which extends to the usual ignorance of staff about popular authors. Among the attractions of independent shops is that the owners and staff exercise their own, sometimes quirky, judgements about stock, have often read the products they sell, and know many of their customers well enough to have an idea of what they might like.

It seems that smaller, independent niche booksellers are not doing too badly. John Mangan, writing in The Age recently, quotes some of them.

Melbourne’s Little Bookroom, which believes it is the oldest children’s bookshop in the world, opened a branch in one of the city’s laneways. ‘‘We had growth in retail sales over Christmas. There seems to be a baby boom at the moment and our main problem has been that we need more and more and more beautifully illustrated books.’’

Independent bookshops say their expert knowledge, deep range and community ties put them on solid ground. ‘‘The industry is definitely changing,’’ Arwen Crawford, acting manager of the independent Brunswick Street Bookstore says. ‘‘ You’ve got to be quite on the ball in terms of adapting and knowing what people want. It’s not that people no longer want to read, it’s more to do with things like how you select your stock.’’

Fitzroy cookbook specialist Books for Cooks is similarly riding out tough times. ‘‘Retail is difficult now, that’s true,’’ says co-owner Tim White. ‘‘Selling cookbooks is what I aim to do. If I was to be a general retailer I’d need huge finance but a niche retailer can focus on what you do well.’’ In his case, that means not having the latest Masterchef book but instead stocking a great range of cookbooks going back to obscure 18th-century volumes — and trying the recipes.

I spent the best part of twenty years of my life as a bookseller. My wife and I, between us, spent the best part of ten years working for Angus & Robertson. Even then, twenty years ago, A & R was poorly run. The business was consistently operated by organisations who knew nothing about books — a large, now defunct, music retailer for instance. We had unimaginably large quantities of remainders (“unreadable failed books”) foisted upon us and completely unrealistic demands to achieve stock turn figures (read: carry less stock but achieve the same or better sales) that were completely impractical for bookselling. These policies all militated against carrying a healthy backlist.

The other main reason that has been advanced for the demise of these businesses is the increasing use of the Internet to purchase books. Personally I think there is some truth in this. However I don’t think it is necessarily a price issue. I have bought an enormous number of books from Amazon.com in the last few years. Most of these purchases have come about as a direct result of e-mails from Amazon which begin “We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated . . . have also purchased . . . ” Many of the recommended books were not available in Australia. Price has rarely been an issue in deciding to buy the recommended titles.

Would it be altogether impossible for a smart software developer, well acquainted with the book industry, to develop a software application for small independent bookshops, which records customer details and details of their purchases, and then, as new publications come into stock, regularly generates e-mails similar to those which Amazon send out? I suppose that if I received that kind of e-mail from the two bookshops which I regularly frequent, I may well check out anything that interested me on the Amazon website, but most likely I would gratefully support the bookshop(s) that sent me such invaluable information.

If small, independent, bookshops could solicit reviews for their websites as well as replicating the excellent “look inside” feature of the Amazon website, they would be well on the way to ensuring they enjoyed a long and happy life!

Having run bookshops are some 20 years if I, as a bookshop manager, had to do this work, it would never be done. However what’s to stop publishers from providing the reviews and the “look inside” feature, and making it available — freely one would hope — to their customers, the bookshops?

A somewhat more alarmist and panic driven response to the collapse of the Borders and Angus & Robertson appeared under the name of James Kirby in the Melbourne age on Saturday, 19 February.

The spectacular collapse of the bookstore chains Borders along with Angus & Robertson means a lot more than just the latest crisis in the book trade; it’s a body blow for the modern heart of retail — the shopping centre.

Booksellers — the weakest link in the retail chain — have served as the litmus test for every phase of the internet’s endless ability to wreak havoc on old business models. If you think about it, the first business to be truly undermined by the internet was the book trade through Amazon.com a decade ago. Now the shopping mall finds that bookstores present what could be the next phase of a nightmare scenario.

Investors in Westfield would not be pleased to hear that REDgroup Retail — the holding company of the book chains that is now in administration — was the second biggest tenant of the giant shopping centre group. The disappearance of two bookshop tenants at the one time from our suburban malls is going to send shudders through every mall in the country.

Kirby concluded his article with the rather hysterical claim that “If shopping centres are to survive as the profitable behemoths we know today it will be as locations for cinema, food, services . . . anything except, well, shops”.

It seems to me that the collapse of these two chains presents Kainos Print as book printers, and authors generally with some interesting opportunities. I have always been a strong advocate of self publishing. I have sold self published books as a bookseller, I have commissioned and edited self published books, and now we print them and seek to help authors with marketing tips and tricks.

Thanks to the growth of digital printing, books can be printed in micro-quantities — anything from around ten copies upwards. We regularly print books in quantities of 100 or so. There is therefore no need to take inordinate financial risks. The market can be tested before contemplating expensive, long, print runs.

Authors earn royalties of between just two or three percent up to ten percent on books published the normal way. Authors who self publish can earn a vastly greater reward for their efforts. In most cases it should be possible to make 100% profit or more. To some extent this depends on the quantity printed. To a large extent it depends on the price set by the author — most set the price too low. I have known large print runs of books self published for fund raising purposes to sell for over $20.00, when the fund raiser paid less than $3.00

Thanks to the Internet authors can promote their books online. One of our customers, Ian Irvine, has a website which shows just what can be done. Click here for a link to Ian’s site (I should add that we print promotional material for Ian, not his books). Any author going down this path will probably need help to optimise their website so that it achieves high rankings in search engines, especially Google. We recommend Jasmine and Anup at Arrow Internet. You can access some tried and tested marketing tips and tricks, and other helpful articles here.

The other obvious opportunity for authors is to turn their books into eBooks and to promote those as well as their hardcopy versions. We have found that produce e-books involves a whole new learning curve and involves purchasing a new suite of software. It seems to us that this is a very new areas of software development and the ideal software does not yet exist. Nevertheless we have put quite a bit of effort into learning how to make e-Books, and it is a service we hope to offer very soon.

In conclusion, I would urge book lovers and authors not to be too despondent at this development. There are plenty of good bookshops around. For instance in Canberra there is the Paperchain in Manuka and Smiths and Electric Shadows in Civic. In Melbourne there is the Avenue Bookstore in Albert Park, Brunswick Bound on Sydney Road, the Sun Bookshop in Yarraville, Books for Cooks in Collingwood, Coventry Bookstore in South Melbourne, Metropolis in the city, Brunswick Street Bookstore in Fitzroy, Sunflower Bookshop in Elsternwick, Readers Feast in Melbourne’s CBD, Readings in Lygon St Carlton, Farrells Bookshop in Mornington and Robinsons Bookshop in Frankston. Some of these shops have a history going back at least thirty or more years and really know their stuff. I don’t know the book scene in other cities, but perhaps readers might like to add to this list from their own experience.

Authors, you should seriously consider self-publishing (which can actually make producing books profitable for authors).

Long live the book!!

Smackdown: Printed Editions vs. Digital Editions

I recently read an amusing article in which a paper company sought to fight back against the “ridiculous” notion that electronic books are greener than printed books.

The article, from a company called International Paper and called “Smackdown: Printed Editions vs. Digital Editions” compared the environmental profile of ink-on-paper publications (dead tree editions) to digital publications (what we might call “dead dinosaur editions” because of the fossil fuels and petrochemicals they consume).

When a respected publication such as The Wall Street Journal claims, as it did recently, that “e-textbooks are environmentally friendly”, it is important to examine the claim to see if it really holds water.

Here, then are some excerpts from the article, comparing Dead Dinosaur Editions with Dead Tree Editions on key attributes.

Raw Materials:

Paper is a renewable resource. The North American “paper and forest products industry replenishes more than it takes and ensures the sustainability of our forests by planting 1.7 million trees every single day, more than three times what is harvested.”But as for dead dinosaur editions,“making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals, including gold, silver and palladium, as well as the extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents.” No one is planting dead dinosaurs into the ground to make more oil for the petrochemicals that digital devices consume.Energy/Carbon Footprint“Sixty percent of the energy used to make paper in the U.S. comes from carbon-neutral renewable resources and is produced on site at mills.” “The electronics industry uses more than 90 percent fossil fuels purchased off the grid.”

Recycling:“In the U.S., nearly 60 percent of all paper is recycled, recovered and reused to make new paper products.” Electronic devices have a recycling rate of only 18%.

User Editing: The Journal article says most students prefer dead-tree textbooks to dead-dinosaur textbooks, partly because they can’t highlight important passages or write notes in e-textbooks.

Reliability: Digital editions are often read on machines running Windows or Vista. ‘Nuf said. Dead-tree editions never crash, get infected with viruses, receive spam, or serve pop-up ads.

Durability: Ever dropped a laptop? Not pretty.

Lifespan: I read a 150-year-old book the other day and have75-year-old copies of National Geographic, but my 15-year-oldWordPerfect for DOS files are either unreadable or FUBAR (look it up on Wikipedia!). How many of today’s laptops, e-book readers, and iPhones will still be in use five years from now?

Waste: “The lifespan of a computer is short, and electronics have become the fastest growing waste stream in the world.” Much of that waste is toxic. Paper is reusable, recyclable, and biodegradable.

Personal Hygiene: Speaking of waste, which would you rather read while sitting on the toilet, a magazine or a Kindle? And remember that, before they had toilet paper, our ancestors had the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Ever tried to wipe your bottom with a Blackberry?

The half dozen comments on the article mostly come down on the side of digital editions. Here is one sample.

    Quick, take all the knowledge on the Internet and print it out. See if you can keep enough trees planted … One Kindle is worth 1,000 books. I’ll exchange a few dollops of rare metals and some plastic casing for all the books it would take to duplicate the information.

For my money, however, a link provided by one of the people who commented on the article is priceless. It opens up a minefield of claims and counter claims, and provides links to various other avenues that attempt to get at the truth of the matter.

We run a printing business, so we have a vested interest in “Dead Tree Editions”. However we download an electronic version of “The Age” every day, and find that we read more of the paper when it is in electronic form that in “Dead Tree” form. Last night I went to a Bible Study group and for the first time didn’t take a hard copy Bible — relied instead on my iPhone where I can search for words and phrases, read passages in various different translations, and even check out the use of words in the original language — all impossible with one hard copy Bible.

We would be very interested in your views on this subject.

Environmentally Friendly Printing: Is recycled paper the greenest choice for printing?

This is the second in a series of articles under the general heading of “Printing companies take their environmental responsibilities seriously“.

Industry guru Phil Lawrence asserts “It’s taken as a given that recycled paper is the greener choice, but there’s a carbon consideration to look at”.

When the printing industry or its customers want to make an environmental statement, the first and most obvious request is that the job be printed on recycled paper. The assumption is that recycled paper is beyond reproach when it comes to environmental credentials. Lawrence writes “Anyone who might have the gall to challenge the ecological value of recycled paper might just be taking on the world. Such investigation could be considered as socially irresponsible as questioning the merits of free public education.”

Phil mused that no-one had done any research to check whether recycled paper really is good for the environment, so he decided to undertake some research himself. He looked at the sustainability reports from a number of international paper manufacturers.

Following are his findings.

“Most companies have a number of individual production sites, each making different types of pulp and paper. I categorised the individual mills into their particular product areas. I ended up with three main types of pulp and paper production.

· Recycled. Any mill that produces paper from post-consumer recycled fibre.
· Separated. A paper mill that does not have its own pulp mill on the same site. Therefore, any pulp used must be transported to the mill. Virgin fibre (ie, not recycled).
· Integrated. Any mill that has its own pulp manufacturing on the same site.

“I didn’t concern myself with forestry arguments at this stage of the research, nor did I consider the emissions and effort required for the collection of recovered waste paper from the community. The only measure I used was the reported emissions it takes to produce one tonne of paper using energy that was either produced on site, or additional purchased energy from the country’s national grid.

“As a general rule, paper manufactured using recycled fibre emits around 800kg of CO2 per tonne of paper. In the case of a separated production facility where only virgin fibre is used, the emissions are around 500kgs per tonne. In a fully integrated pulp and paper mill, the emissions of CO2 can be very low, but on average around 200kgs of CO2 per tonne of paper. So it does beg the question, if recycled paper has always been considered so good for the environment, why has no one noticed that using recycled fibre produces so much CO2?

“Not everyone has been fooled by the myth of recycled paper. In a study carried out in Sweden at the University of Agricultural Sciences in 1997, Stig Bystrom and Lars Lonnstedt concluded that ‘increased utilisation of recycled paper is harmful for the environment.'”

Whenever a customer asks us for a quote (say for a book printing) using recycled paper, I point out that there are other factors that should be considered, and that these other factors may be far more important in evaluating the environmental friendliness of a job. Kainos Print has produced a white paper on environmentally friendly printing. It can be downloaded from our whitepapers page here.