Jan. 22nd is the B to B day for business buyers, CEOs, press, & procurement professionals.

Jan. 23-24th is for all business professionals & all consumers & their families.

Hundreds of exhibits will encompass a wide variety of green products & services ranging from solar panels, hybrid cars, organic personal care products, eco-pet supplies, greener gadgets, eco-fashion, and home and building supplies that will help us live a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle.

Eco-Celebrity speakers, authors & thought leaders such as Ed Begley Jr., Mariel Hemingway, John Picard & Eric Corey Freed will lead informative discussions! Don’t miss Los Angeles’ ultimate eco-extravaganza! Limited booth space is still available. Contact Seth Berk at 212-655-4505 ext. 224 or sberk@gogreenexpo.com today.

Details: www.GoGreenExpo.com
Use promo code GREENPROFS for 50% off ticket price of only $10 for the entire weekend!

• One and a half billion ink cartridges and 350 million laser cartridges are dumped every year, a figure that increases by 12% every year.
• It takes nearly a gallon of fossil oil to produce one laser cartridge and 2.5 ounces of oil to manufacture one ink cartridge, not counting the energy required in the production process.
• Each toner cartridge becomes 3.5 pounds of solid waste.The total weight of these cartridges is equivalent to the weight of 112,463 Volkswagen Beetles per year.
• The typical cartridge is composed of 40% plastic, 40% metal and smaller percentages of rubber, paper, foam and toner. Dumped in the landfill, it can take up to 450 years to decompose.

Increased Environmental Pollution from Printing

In addition to the issues listed above, consider the following:

Some of the ingredients in toner and ink may be toxic and contain some amount of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and ultrafice particiles (UFPs). This results in increased:

• Atmospheric CO2s during production
• Respiratory diseases resulting from emission of ultrafine particles during printing
• Cancerous pollutants (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) during burning of used cartridges

Go Green and Save Money with PretonSaver(tm) at Home and the Office

Now there is a way to complement your existing green initiatives, build sustainable communities by reducing your carbon footprint and save money at the same through a reduction in ink and toner consumption.

PretonSaver(tm) is new and innovative software that addresses the environmental issues with toner and ink as well as the escalating costs of toner and ink consumption by using Pixel Optimizer(tm) technology. Pixel optimization reduces toner and ink consumption by up to 50% without degrading print quality.

The software is easily installed on the desktop or laptop and provides real-time statistics on just how much toner and ink you are saving.

How Does PretonSaver Reduce Ink and Toner Usage up to 50%?

Computer screen pixels are square, but printer pixels are round. The conversion from squares to circles when printing results in extensive overuse of toner and ink and millions of dollars of unnecessary costs for individuals and organizations around the world.

How PretonSaver Works (a 2-minute video)

This is a short 2-minute video that explains how PretonSaver works from a technical perspective. Learn about the innovative Pixel Optimizer technology

Start Saving at Home for $31.99 and at the Office from $35 to $55 per User

The following links will present you with more information about both the Enterprise and Home versions of PretonSaver.  The first three links are for the Enterprise version (for corporate and office use) and the last link is for the Home version where you can download, trial and purchase.

Datasheet

Case Studies

Customer Testimonials

For more information and to download the Home version of PretonSaver

HalftheInk is the site for information and downloading the 30-day free trial of the Home version of the software.

“No matter where you are in the adoption of green practices, you will find a wealth of knowledge and advice on this site-within-a-site. It offers a collection of tips and tools from basic knowledge for those just starting out, to sophisticated charts for evaluating green printing papers and calculating environmental savings,” says Phil Cavalier, vice president of marketing at Appleton Coated.

In particular, creative professionals will want to explore the “Being Green” section. This presents general knowledge and resources on green paper choices including a sustainability spectrum to help determine where an organization or individual currently stands on environmental responsibility. It advises on how to decipher environmental logos, and how to create credit lines that communicate chain of custody certifications and use of post-consumer fiber or green power.

The “Print Green” section addresses various considerations to contemplate in selecting environmentally responsible printing options. It features an essential checklist of green printing tips with suggestions to:
* Ask questions about existing or proposed printed pieces — such as size, format and page count — to save paper without sacrificing the marketing message.
* Repurpose printed pieces for multiple uses, with advanced planning.
* Order recycled-content paper, as well as custom paper sizes, to reduce waste.
* Avoid excessive “travel” in the printed piece by reducing the distances among paper mill, printer, bindery and mailing house.

Another strong area of interest for designers and all communications professionals is the “Sharing Green” section, which reveals techniques to develop and share one’s own green stories. Exemplifying successful, green storytelling, visitors can read tales from Vosges Haut-Chocolat, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Grand Valley State University, Scholastic, Quality Bicycle Products, Roger Williams University, Subaru of Indiana, and Burt’s Bees. Recently, a new green story was added on how strategic design firm, Rule29 of Geneva, Ill., has modified its own green practices and brings sustainable options to its customers.

“The online content draws from our current research and printed, educational materials as showcased in ‘The Green Outlook,’ ‘Driving Your Green Story Home’ and ‘Green Made Simple.’ The Utopia Green Zone organizes this information in a convenient, visually unified presentation that is available to visitors 24/7. We plan to continue updating this zone with more green success stories, research, tips, tools and the latest in green options from Appleton Coated,” says Cavalier.

The Utopia brand of coated printing papers is highlighted in the “Utopia Green” section. The product selection includes U1X:Green and U2:XG, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified products manufactured with extra post-consumer recovered fiber (20% and 30% respectively) and electricity in the form of renewable energy. Available in three finishes and up to 120 lb. cover, both papers can be specified in traditional folio or digital sizes and web applications. The Utopia Express Custom Size Sheet Program allows U1X:Green and U2:XG customers to save time, money, and resources with ‘two-days to ship’ service on custom-size sheets.

Appleton Coated offers the most comprehensive lineup of premium coated papers available today marketed under the Utopia brand. From the elegance of Premium to hardworking Utopia Three, the Utopia family of coated papers offers six ways to ignite a passion for paper and the environment. Appleton Coated is headquartered in Kimberly, Wisconsin.
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It’s almost Christmas, a time of the year when probably the highest proportion of stationary is used all around the world. It’s a time of joy and happiness, a time when everyone gets together with their near and dear ones to celebrate the birth of Jesus and await the advent of a new year. It’s a time when people sit back and relax after a long hard year to see it silently pass by.

As I said, it’s the time when stationeries are probably used more than in any other time throughout the year. Greeting cards are sent in bulks to families, friends and colleagues. Gifts are exchanged and surely they need to be wrapped in proper attractive gift-wraps to make them appear just more than presentable.

Christmas today is more commercialized than it ever was. With new gifts and products coming up especially for the occasion, they need to be marketed more vigorously than other products at other times of the year. This requires the companies coming up with these products and services to rev-up the newsletters, periodicals and posters in order to boost their marketing strategy and get an edge over competition. New booklets and brochures are designed for the same purpose.

By the time Christmas is over everyone starts preparing for the New Year. A time to remember and bid adieu to all the good and bad things that marked the current year, and welcome with open hands, the beginning of something new. By this time, calendars for the New Year starts circulating and notepads and other office stationeries are replaced with newer ones.

Amidst all the joy and celebration, Christmas is probably the most wasteful time of the year. Piles of gift-wraps, ribbons, old stationeries and decorations fill up the lands. And this in turn, adds to the causes that could bring the entire mankind and the world we live in under great danger. All the printed materials, which are so abundantly used during this time and disbursed, require a lot of petroleum-based inks, laminates, varnishes, and adhesives for production. And these materials cause the printing houses to produce VOCs. VOCs or volatile organic compounds are organic chemical compounds that have a high vapor pressure under normal conditions and have the potential to vaporize and enter the atmosphere.

These VOCs in all forms are potentially harmful to the environment. When released into the atmosphere, they can actively damage soil and groundwater. Moreover, vapors of VOCs released into the atmosphere cause air pollution and this increases the risk of asthma attack and other health hazards.

But this does not mean that the only possible option to save mankind and earth is by giving up on Christmas. Nowadays, most of the printing houses are ‘going green’ in a bid to contribute towards the global cause of anti-pollution movement. Green printing is what most of the sensible minds behind the printing industry is adapting to. They are using advanced techniques and recyclable raw materials to conserve energy for the future of the planet. They keep track of their total energy usage and implement strategies for offsetting the environmental impact of their businesses. They are trying to minimize the consumption of electricity and use papers only from companies certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as it proclaims that the paper comes from well-managed forests that adhere to strict environmental standards.

With the option of green printing on our hands, it’s time celebrate Christmas in a new way-a Christmas without worries and guilt of causing harm to mankind and the planet, a Christmas that’s all celebrations!

Whether it’s a book report of a letter to a friend, always run a spelling and grammar check to correct any mistakes you might have made. It’s always better to look twice and print once. A lot of ink and toner can be wasted printing pages you don’t need or can’t use.

There are different quality settings that will vary the life of your ink or toner cartridges. It may be automatically set to print at a higher quality than you need for everyday print jobs like emails and driving directions.
For these things, Draft Mode, which is quicker and uses less ink or toner, will give you what you need. Go to Print > Properties > Print Quality and select draft quality.

Colour ink is generally more expensive than black ink, so it’s best to use it when you really need it. Save colour ink by switching to greyscale printing when you don’t need bright hues. Go to File > Print and click Properties. Then choose the Colour tab and check “Print in greyscale.” Then just click OK.

Most of us will be familiar with the dot-matrix printers of old; the striped green and white paper, the perforated edges and the 1980′s style font. It brings back memories of days gone by, when computing was a simpler process, doesn’t it? However, many of the younger generations will be unfamiliar with such technology, having instead been raised on the high quality output of modern day inkjet printers. They take their glossy photos and 25 page per minute print times for granted, never thinking to ask how the technology was developed. Well, this article hopes to change that, giving an account of inkjet printings history as well as a brief look at its possible future.

Although the first range of inkjet printers hit the shelves in the 1980′s, their development had begun almost 20 years before when manufacturers realised the huge potential of printers that spray a tiny jet of ink onto a page to create the final image. There were numerous technical problems to overcome however, and this was reflected in the price of the first publicly available machines; the Hewlett Packard DeskJet cost over $1000 when it was first released in 1988!

So how does the inkjet printer work? There are several technologies involved, but they predominantly operate by propelling variable sized ink droplets onto any medium one may wish to print to. Three of the big four manufacturers use print cartridges that have a current run through them; this current creates a bubble of ink to form at the nozzle which propels the tiny droplet of ink onto the page. Effectively the bursting of the ink bubble draws yet more ink through the nozzle and so another jet is ‘fired’ at the page. Thinking about it, it’s no wonder that the technology took over 20 years to develop prior to becoming widely available!

The original inkjet printers were capable of firing around 192 drops of ink per inch (dpi), allowing for near letter quality prints (equivalent to a typewriter). Modern inkjet can achieve a resolution of almost 4800 dpi, producing the photo-realistic results that we all know and love!

Commercial inkjet printing has undergone many transformations, with large format inkjet printing long available as well as smaller, hand held instruments designed to print labels or barcodes on products at an incredibly low cost.

Its hard to imagine where inkjet technology could go in the future and what other applications it could be used for. But one new manufacturer has recently launched an inkjet printer capable of printing 30 6″x4″ photos a minute (roughly 25x faster than standard inkjets) and at a fraction of the cost of traditional prints. If this is anything to go by, the future development is likely to be significantly quicker than that made over the past 30 or so years!

With the growing concerns over the environment it should be firmly set in everyone’s mind that we all need to do our bit to help save the planet. There are numerous things which can be done including reducing co2 emissions, recycling waste and using recycled products.

Here we discuss what can be done to make a greener office and ask you to think when you next purchase your office supplies, consider going ‘green’ and purchasing recycled office products?

Gone are the days when the only type of green office products you could find were recycled paper and envelopes. There are now plenty of 100% recycled office products to choose from as well as many more part-recycled products.

Within the 100% recycled range you can expect to find everything from paper, envelopes, Avery labels and post-it notes through to rulers, refill leads and various filing and storage folders.

The part-recycled range of office supplies is far more extensive and you can get a green replacement of virtually every type of office product you use on a regular basis. A few examples which I’m sure some people may never have expected to be available are listed here: staplers and staple removers, hole-punches, PVC lever-arch folders, pens and markers, CD/DVD casings and even cable ducting.

Another thing to consider is your printer consumables. Printer cartridges and toners can be easily recycled and a remanufactured replacement purchased. The quality of recycled cartridges has greatly improved.

Look out for the different logos on products which indicate whether a product has been certified green and most will include additional information about its green credentials. Labels can be found from the following organizations such as EU Eco-label, FSC, Maxima Green, Nordic Swan and Blue Angel.

And why not do your bit for the environment by having a recycling system installed at your workplace which will encourage you to separate your rubbish.

When you next think about buying disposable plates and bowls look out for some of the excellent bio-degradable options on the market. This does not mean sacrificing quality for flimsy paper plates because what you can now get are a strong rigid product made from plant fibre – they are even microwavable!

It’s not just office products. You may also wish to consider becoming more socially responsible by purchasing fair-trade goods which can be identified by the fair-trade logo. There is also an Ethical Tea Partnership which works in much the same way as the Fair-trade Foundation.

As well as buying green there are also some little things you can do in the office which will help save the environment and you money! Switch off lights and unused office equipment, buy energy saving light-bulbs, encourage colleagues not to print emails and documents unless necessary.

So go on – buy ‘Green’ when your current office supplies expire and do your bit to help save the planet!

It is no secret that one of the easiest ways to save your business money is to run more efficiently. This applies to all aspects of your business, but the printer and copier fleet is commonly overlooked. Many companies simply track the cost of toner, and that can yield a large amount of savings on its own. But the savings can go much beyond toner alone. Managed Print Services (MPS) paired with eco-friendly; super efficient printers, can save money on paper, energy, toner, reduced downtime, increased productivity and more.

MPS, like the name implies; basically means you rely on a specialized IT company to help plan, implement and service your printer fleet. The advantage of having your printing network planned and managed by one vendor is that it saves a substantial amount of time fixing IT problems, ordering toner and implementing new document management systems. Imagine never having to order toner and the time saved by only having one invoice to deal with every month; now this is being efficient.

Another way of being more efficient is choosing an eco-friendly printer fleet. Eco-friendly printers, such as Kyocera, can save up to 40% on energy costs when compared to other market leaders. They can also save you money on consumables. Using less toner and drum units reduces money and waste while helping the environment. The reduced waste is one reason Kyocera won the prestigious, MicroScope Award for Channel Excellence (ACE) as Environmental Company of the Year in 2008.

It isn’t only about reduced waste; it is also about reduced downtime. Nothing costs a company more money than downtime.  When it comes to reliability, not all brands are created equal. For instance, the Kyocera KM-8030 printed 2 million pages with no unscheduled service required. In fact, it only got a paper jam once every 166 thousand pages. Brands like Kyocera are more reliable and have reduced cost per prints which is why H&R Block has 10’s of thousands of them nationwide.

Finally, if you really want to increase your savings and decrease your impact on the environment, implement a document management system. Even the simplest document management systems will reduce paper and toner consumption and increase productivity. Document management will reduce the time spent on filing and retrieving documents and make documents more accessible – no matter where you and your employees are.

The opportunity to save money and help the environment is obtainable. Even if your business’ printers are new and you believe you have an efficient printer fleet having an outside MPS vendor may help you see the base of the iceberg more clearly. Many times a MPS provider will analyze your network and printer fleet for free resulting in little to no risk of saving your business money.

Many times, companies create printed marketing literature using whatever colors blend well. Many more choose the color printing scheme based on the image of their business. What many do not take into consideration is that colors are associated with certain feelings. Send a subliminal message by incorporating the appropriate colors into your advertisement.

Calm, cool, and clean are all associated with the color blue. Light blue especially evokes feelings of quiet and peace. A deeper blue can also be associated with water.

Life, growth, wealth, and sometimes envy are connected to the color green. Like blue, most green shades also have a calming affect on people.

The color yellow emits feelings of warmth and joy. The darker shades of yellow stand out easily, which is why many street hazard signs are painted yellow.

Love, heat, and excitement can all be a part of the color red. Use it carefully, though, as red can also symbolize violence and can actually raise blood pressure.

Energy, Fun, and Warmth are associated with orange. It is a combination of the happiness of yellow and the harshness of red. Orange is also a symbol of the sun.

Purple shades provoke emotions relating to royalty, spirituality, and mystery. Although purple can evoke curiosity and imagination, it can also be depressing if used too much.

For a natural, steadfast, friendly style, use the color brown. This shade can be used when needing a neutral look or when you want to create mental images of rock, stone, or earth.

The color white is associated with purity and innocence. Like blue, it gives the appearance of cleanliness. White can also be too bright if not used correctly.

Sophisticated, conservative, and slimming are related to the color black. This shade when used opposite of white can be seen as rebellious or mysterious.

Of course, many other shades of colors exist from those mentioned above, and most include their own emotional evocations. This basic list, though, will give you a place from which to start when learning to design based on the hidden messages in color printing.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit: Color Printing