Non-Profit Initiates Next Stage of its Mission to Stop Greenwashing

Two Sides Urges Leading U.S. Companies to End Misleading Claims about Print and Paper

(CHICAGO) March 12, 2013 – Two Sides today announced the next stage of its nationwide initiative to urge major U.S. banks, utilities and telecommunication companies to end the use of misleading marketing claims about the sustainability of print and paper. Phase Two will include a second round of communication intended to initiate productive discussion with senior management in the target industries, reminding them of their responsibility to adhere to best practices for environmental marketing as outlined in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s recently revised Green Guides.

Last year, Two Sides contacted senior bank, utility and telecom executives, encouraging them to follow the yet-to-be-released FTC Green Guides, which say that environmental marketing claims should not exaggerate environmental impacts and must be substantiated. While some responded positively, many of the nation’s top banks, utilities and telecoms continue to tell their customers that switching to online billing and communication is better for the environment than print and paper with no verifiable or credible supporting evidence. With the release of the updated Green Guides in October 2012, the FTC made it official that that unqualified environmental language would be viewed as deceptive marketing, strengthening the Two Sides call for change.

“Two Sides has no desire to cause unnecessary negative publicity for these companies or to undermine their cost-saving and efficiency reasons for driving customers towards e-billing, but claims that print and paper are environmentally unfriendly need to stop,” says Two Sides President Phil Riebel. “Rather than call these respected companies out publicly with greenwashing complaints, we’d much prefer to amicably work with them behind the scenes to help develop messaging that meets the Green Guides standards for environmental marketing,” he says. “However, we’re prepared to use the strongest means necessary to put an end to the use of unsupported environmental claims that are potentially damaging to the paper, printing and mailing sectors which support millions of U.S. Jobs.”

Two Sides conducted a similar campaign to get companies in the United Kingdom to drop or revise unsupported environmental claims about printed media with great success. More than 80 percent of the U.K. companies approached – including well-known names like British Telecom, Barclaycard, Vodafone and EON Energy – worked with Two Sides to eliminate misleading or factually incorrect environmental claims about the use of print and paper.

“The fact is, print and paper products made in the U.S. have a great environmental story to tell,” Riebel says. “Paper comes from a renewable resource – trees grown in responsibly managed forests – and it’s recycled more than any other commodity, including plastics, metals and glass. The continuing demand for sustainably sourced paper gives U.S. landowners a financial incentive to continue managing their lands responsibly and keep them forested rather than selling them for development – the number one cause of deforestation in the United States. Thanks in great part to the sustainable forestry practices advanced by the paper and forest products industry, the volume of growing trees in U.S. forests has increased nearly 50 percent over the last half century and the total acres of forestland has remained essentially unchanged for 100 years.”

The direct impact of electronic products and services replacing paper is far from negligible, and the trade-offs between the two depends on how often we use the different technologies and how we dispose of the products. Both electronic and print media are important, and both have environmental impacts that must be taken into consideration. Electronic communication has a significant and growing carbon footprint due to the energy requirements of a vast worldwide network of servers necessary to store information for immediate access. Electronic communication also relies on significant amounts of fossil-fuel energy and non-renewable raw materials for processing and manufacturing. With electronic waste becoming the fastest growing waste stream in the world and related environmental and health concerns escalating rapidly in many countries, promoting “going paperless” as the best environmental choice is unfounded.

It’s also important to note that equating electronic billing and statements with “going paperless” is misleading. When traditional bills and statements are converted to electronic communication, much of that paper is replaced by home or office printing by those who prefer or require a permanent hard copy. Furthermore, a recent study by NACHA, the Electronic Payments Association, showed that up to 40 percent of consumers receive both electronic and paper statements.

“Some of the major U.S. companies in the financial, telecom and utility sectors are to be commended for implementing sustainability initiatives that focus on true performance measurement and factual environmental claims, but others are lagging behind in terms of credible messaging,” Riebel says. “Two Sides is committed to help change this, and our experience to date shows that we’ve been successful in finding mutually acceptable solutions.”

Two Sides is an independent, non-profit organization created to promote the responsible production, use and sustainability of print and paper. Started in Europe in 2008, Two Sides is now active in more than 12 countries. The organization has more than 1,000 members that span the entire print and paper supply chain, including pulp and paper producers, paper distributors, ink and chemical manufacturers, printers, equipment manufacturers and publishers. For more information about Two Sides visit the Two Sides website at www.twosides.us.

Full Disclosure Statement: The GREEN (LIVING) REVIEW received no compensation for any component of this article.

Paper is good for you and the environment

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Time and again misguided and misinformed people, especially in the environmental movement, come out with the phrase of paper being a tree killed and such like. Nothing could be further from the truth, however.

We are being told that paperless is the way to go and that e-books and e-book readers are the way to go. However, does anyone consider the impact of the e-books and their readers?

I am all for PDFs which can be read on one's computer or – dare I say it – printed out for reading but e-readers, with their factored in obsolescence of a couple of years and such are, in fact, not very environmentally friendly at all, despite claims.

When the claim is made that paper is a killer of trees and printed books are called dead trees all one can say to that is that either the people making such claims are very naïve and misguided or, and I am being a devil's advocate here, have a hidden agenda.

Far from being a killer of trees paper and cardboard and the paper industry in fact are responsible for millions of acres of trees, grown to produce pulp for paper, and replanted later to grow more trees for pulp for paper. Without the paper industry many of those areas, which are often marginal lands, would not be having any significant tree cover at all and some might, in fact, be housing or industrial estates.

Paper also can be easily recycled, even if only as animal bedding, such as for chickens (and this can be done at home with a shredder) and then composted. On the other hand waste and old paper can also be used make new paper. Something that cannot be done with an e-reader.

Furthermore you never own an e-book for, say, Kindle, but only, even though you pay good money for it, borrow it, to all intents and purposes. You may not, legally, pass it on to someone else, not even onto someone else's e-reader. A printed book, on the other hand, you can pass on, resell or what have you. You own it. Not so with an e-book.

The paper industry has the stigma of being incredibly harmful for the environment. However, here are some facts for you to make it clearer as to why this is not the case:

• Paper’s primary raw materials are renewable resources and the paper and forest products industry plants more than 1.7 million trees every day in the U.S. alone. That is three more times than what is harvested.

• Paper is biodegradable, recyclable, and reusable. Almost 60% of all paper is recycled in the U.S. The stats for other countries may be better or they may be worse but all of that can be changed.

• The paper industry is one of the world’s largest users of renewable, low-carbon energy. 60% of the energy used to make paper in the U.S. comes from self-generated carbon-neutral renewable resources.

Here are a couple of more fact that link to the above or stand separately:

• The forest products industry is the largest producer of renewable biomass energy in the United States, generating 77% of the nation’s industrial biomass energy. Additionally, the renewable energy generated by the forest products industry exceeds all of the nation’s solar, wind and geothermal energy generation combined.

• The forest products industry is also a leader in the production of renewable energy, with more than 65% of the on-site energy needed to produce paper products derived from carbon-neutral biomass.

• More trees are grown in the United States than which are harvested and the amount of U.S. forestland has remained essentially the same for the last 100 years at about 750 million acres, even though the U.S. population tripled during the same period.

When it comes to the paper industry, their forests are not part of the state forests in any country generally but they actually have their own woods and forests which they manage for wood for paper and cardboard. And, if the use of paper would cease tomorrow altogether, or we'd all use less of the stuff, many of those forests would be grubbed out and sold to developers no doubt.

In more cases than not paper is better for you and the environment than would be the electronic equivalent. So let's stop the perpetuation of the myths that paper is causing the deforestation of the Amazon and other tropical forests and deforestation in general. It simply is not true.

© 2013

The paperless office

“The what?”, I hear you say. Yeah, exactly!

by Michael Smith

With the advent of the computer, the PC in offices and then in homes, we were told that the paperless office was nigh. Well, I don't know where it has ended up then for I have not seen it, as yet. Must be taking the scenic route.

Instead of less paper we seem to be using more paper and generating ever more printed materials. Because now we can print out any little document, any book, anything we want. We can even bind the books with the right little, and not so little, tools and gadgets. Which is all nice and fine but more paper.

Oh, and we were also going to have so much free and spare time once the computers were everywhere. Yeah, right! Pardon! Now people send you emails and it arrived at 10am and by 2pm they are already at you asking whether you have gotten their email. Yes, so... It takes sometimes a while to compose a proper reply, does it not.

So, instead of having made everything easier I personally think it has made things somewhat more complicated and stressful. But that was not what we were really talking about here. So, let's get back to the non-existent paperless office.

The problem that I find, and that is why I have to admit that I am one of those who prints out quite a lot of emails, is that reading an email that requires detailed and in depth reply on screen and then replying to it straight away that way if not all that easy. Unless you have one pane to read it and another to reply in, and that, in my opinion, is rather a pain. And that pun was intended.

Hence I admit that I print out a lot of emails in oder to be able to read the text properly while working on a reply and I am sure that I am not the only one who does just that.

I also still find it a lot easier to draft an email by hand – yes, pen & paper – before I then type it and send it. Old-fashioned me, I know.

So, the paperless office, I am afraid to say, is either something that is never going to be coming or it is still a very long way off.

To be very honest, in the way I do like to read, for instance, books and such, in printed form, on paper, I also must say that I rather do not have paper disappear. I also, as said, use paper to a great degree, and especially for note taking and I know that I am not the only one and hence paper must and will remain.

One things also has to be said and that is that paper and pen(cil) are reliable, don't require batteries,, it does not matter too much whether they get wet or whatever. The data remains and you can write with a pen and paper in so many different conditions where even Netbooks and hand-held computers cannot be used.

I can, therefore, not see the entirely paperless office. A lot of the storage, however could be done on computers and also many daily, weekly, monthly and other periodicals could and should, maybe, be produced paperless.

I would rather get magazines in PDF format via email or downloadable from sites than having to buy them in glossy paper. That certainly would be and is the way to go. Books too can be published that way, especially, books that are not the kind you normally would like to curl up with somewhere, e.g. those that are not novels. They too could be done in the electronic format of PDF and PDF is, in my opinion the best way for e-books. Other formats require special readers and hence make is all a farce and negate any savings.

As far as the paperless office is concerned, the only thing we can wish, really, and hope for, is an office that uses less paper. Paper will remain something that we will have to have and use and hence it cannot be totally eliminated in offices, in publishing and elsewhere. Not everything can not should it be done electronically.

Personally, and I have said this before, I am still a “paper merchant” and also a “pen & paper merchant” in that I still use that very frequently, as I have never trusted a hand-held computer or PDA, for instance, ever since I had a Palm go haywire on me and no one from the company wanted to know. Customer service was non existent. It is then that I went to the “hipster PDA” and notelets that are printable from the likes of iScrybe application and such online.

It is my view that pen and paper or even better still pencil and paper are much more reliable than any electronic device for note taking and such, simply for the fact that pen and paper won't break down for lack of battery or for the fact that it has been dropped. I have recently washed a Prodir pen and it neither leaked and it worked again straight out of the washing machine.

So, as I said before, an office that uses less paper – and not just offices – if what we can aim for. Totally paperless is firstly a more or less impossibility and secondly probably also something we cannot do anyway and also may not want to do. There is going to be always a place for paper. We can make it last so much longer, however, as well if we but reuse all of that which is only printed on one side for various things; making small notebooks is but one answer.

Years ago many businesses, those that had access to their own printing especially, used one side printed paper for the making of telephone message pads, notepads, etc. Today we all have that facility with the printers that are attached to our computers. So there is no reason for not reusing paper that has only been printed on one side.

Thick paper from advertising, press releases, and such like, whether glossy or not, can be printed with business cards on the other side via the Avery programs, for instance, and then maybe laminated so they last longer and then cut. I do this all the time, nearly. Other paper can be used to print drafts of from the computer or can be made into a variety of note pages and such like. And, once that is all done, then, finally, the paper can be sent too recycling or b e composted.

© M Smith (Veshengro), December 2008
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