By Kurt Konow, Production Print Marketing Strategist, Ricoh Americas Corporation

It’s been a few weeks since I shared with you my initial steps to implementing an effective multichannel marketing program.  Hopefully you had a chance to think about the process and now you’re ready for my Four Key Elements for Ultimate Success! Ready – Set – Read!

Here are the four things to keep in mind when it comes to successfully designing and implementing multichannel solutions:

• It all starts with good data. Managing the data used in a multichannel campaign is crucial to success. You will need to work closely with your customer to understand the sources of data available about their customers and prospects, from flat file data to data stored in more sophisticated relational databases. Examining the data available about buying habits and preferences will help in developing a multichannel campaign that is highly personalized. Of course, it is also essential to cleanse the data to ensure accuracy and bolster results.

• Keep the message consistent, but vary the approach to leverage each channel’s strength. A direct mail piece and a video are two completely different mediums. Direct mail needs to deliver its message with a concise and attention grabbing approach, whereas video is a great medium for telling a story in a warm and personal way. Keep the marketing message consistent, but don’t forget to take advantage of the strength of each particular channel.

• Make sure your customer is prepared for real time response. From social media to PURLs and QR codes, today’s multichannel campaigns offer a real-time opportunity to engage with businesses. You can help ensure that your customer’s multichannel campaign is a success by advising them about the need to align their internal resources, from sales to customer service, so that they are prepared to respond quickly to inquiries, meeting the expectations that these channels create with their customers.

• Track results. Keeping track of the success of your customer’s marketing campaign, by channel, will offer rich insights into where the target audience can most effectively be reached. Doing so will also help you evaluate and fine-tune multichannel campaigns with your customers to ensure that messages are being communicated effectively in each channel.

Your customers are looking to leverage every opportunity available to reach their target audience with a consistent, personalized and effective message. Offering valuable and effective multichannel solutions is an excellent way for print service providers of all sizes to move beyond a traditional product and services portfolio and become trusted marketing consultants for their customers.

By Kurt Konow, Production Print Marketing Strategist, Ricoh Americas Corporation

I very much enjoy visiting customers and talking to them about their current business.  I can be guaranteed that the topic of how to expand their portfolio in order to attract new customers and increase revenue is on their discussion list – and who doesn’t want to do that?  One of the “hot” applications that I like to share with these forward-thinking businesses is multichannel marketing.  While most theoretically understand the concept behind multichannel marketing, many companies are still challenged with implementing the strategy. Over the next few weeks I will discuss the strategy and steps it will take for you to start designing and implementing effective multichannel marketing campaigns.  In fact, I will share with you a “live” campaign that I created and implemented at Ricoh – so, “YES,” I understand the challenges and effort it takes to deploy a multichannel marketing campaign.

Understanding multichannel marketing is fast becoming a requirement for commercial printers, franchise printers and print service providers of all sizes. The Internet and mobile technologies have triggered an explosion in the types of messaging media available, giving everyone no choice but to respond. For example, it has forced marketers to use different channels to attract different demographic groups in order to maximize the reach and response rates for their messages. The good news is of all this is that it presents print service providers with an excellent opportunity to expand their portfolio of products and services.  However, there are a number of considerations to take into account when it comes to offering multichannel solutions broad enough to get results.

First, the design and execution of a multichannel campaign will involve strategic as well as tactical planning to ensure you are creating a common graphic design scheme and consistent messaging across all media—keeping the campaign coordinated through every touch. This not only creates the side benefit of reinforcing a company’s branding, it also increases the effectiveness of the campaign overall by making it possible for the recipient to interact with a familiar campaign over multiple channels. Next comes the question, what actions do your customers want from prospects or customers and how do you want them to respond to your call to action? It is important to offer the ability to respond in multiple ways to any given campaign, and you’ll want to make sure those responses can be captured and measured.

Several months ago, we created our own multichannel campaign for Graph Expo 2011 to illustrate the possibilities a multichannel marketing campaign can offer. We started with a goal of getting printers to share their success stories as business owners—something we knew would be of interest to everyone running their own business today.

Our overarching theme would be, “Making it Happen.” The purpose of the campaign was to ask printers how they made “it” happen—how did they achieve long-term success and continual business growth? We wanted to find out how today’s printers were finding success and get them to share their stories, and we gave them the ability to do that over a variety of mediums. At each touch point, our call to action was simple: share your “it” with the graphic communication community.

Multi-Touch

The campaign incorporated five different channels: direct mail, PURLs, a microsite, QR codes and social media marketing. The focal point of the campaign came from six customer profiles, presented in short, easy-to-produce video segments. In each video, a Ricoh customer shared their story and the secret to the success of their business. From this dialogue, we hoped to spur conversation and feedback from other print providers who wanted to share their “it” as well.

The first touch in the campaign was a personalized direct mail piece incorporating variable data from our database of more than 10,000 printers. The call to action in the piece was a PURL that led recipients to a microsite/landing page where they could watch a customer profile video and fill out a registration form to visit our booth at Graph Expo. At the booth, we offered a wealth of resources available to help printers find their “it,” and also invited booth visitors to film a short segment with us and share their “it” through social media.

Additionally, the mailer profiled two successful business owners in a variety of printing segments, including commercial, transactional, franchise and quick-printing. Included with each business owner profile was a QR code, which the recipient could scan with a smartphone and then be taken to a case study video of the profiled Ricoh customer. At the end of each video was another call to action to visit the Ricoh booth at Graph Expo and share your “it.”

While your customers may not want to go as far as we did with their multichannel campaign, my point in sharing this is that there does not have to be just one way to get your customer’s message to their target market. It is important to evaluate the capabilities of each execution channel at your disposal and decide which will be best for achieving the end goal—a response to your call to action.

WOW – that was a lot of information!  Let’s take a break for now. Next I’ll share with you my Four Key Elements for Success when you’re designing and implementing multichannel marketing campaigns.  Stay Tuned!

Encyclopedia Britannica Ends Print, Goes Digital! They Were Ready For Change, Are You?

As we embark on our quest to embrace technology and find ways to improve our business with it, I came across this interesting article over my first cup of coffee this morning. It turns out even a printed tradition, something that has been on the shelves of millions of homes and libraries across this country, is moving on with technology as well.

Encyclopedia Britannica is going to end its printed editions and go to an entirely digital model. Now, this is no small change. Encyclopedia Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopedia still in print. First published in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland, it’s moving to an all-digital version that will be available online. Talk about a dramatic change to this company’s business model!

How much of a change? The printed edition was available every two years at a cost of $1,400. An online subscription costs just $70 per year. New apps will run you from $1.99 to $4.99. This is not a project new for Britannica. In fact, they have been preparing for these changes over the past 20 years. Certainly a progressive view for a company known for an iconic print tradition.

So, if Encyclopedia Britannica can do it, I think it makes sense that we all must ask; “How well do I prepare for and adapt change?” Here are a few tips in case you’re struggling a bit:

1) Establish a community of open communication: Using technology to open up lines of communication within your organization, can help create a sense of belonging and  identity among community members. People are often afraid to admit when they don’t understand something. The social media revolution has certainly changed that! Today, we can use technology to learn what we don’t know or find out what we were afraid to ask. So I use technology to reach out to one another and share and exchange information.

2) Introduce yourself: The concept behind what is “crowdsourcing” is using group think to complete a project. Find ways to crowd source within your own company walls. When you find an idea that works, implement it and share with other areas. It’s amazing how ideas will grow! Just like a social network expands, so do ideas that are planted, shared and nurtured across the organization.

3) Remember you are always learning: The day we stop training and learning about new tools, techniques or ways of doing things is the day we limit our individual success!  It’s important to dedicate time to training and learning, just like you do for scheduling meetings and sales calls. Treat it as a priority. It won’t happen by accident. You must make a focused effort to continue to educate yourself as  an investment that will pay huge dividends in the long run.

4) Be a role model:  In every avenue of life it is important to be role models and leaders. I often liken it to being at the beach. Once a few people jump in and say the water is fine, before you know it, we are all in for the swim! During times of change when people are afraid they look to each other. If we embrace the change, the people around us will follow. Believe in yourself and others will believe as well.

5) Positive reinforce is the best habit: The first sign of fear is to resist something or downplay it. Look for those signs from your team and counter them with positives. Take some time to give an extra hand to colleagues who are more nervous about change. It’s important to remind people how important their contributions are to the organization. Again, a group of positive people working together is much stronger than any individual. Use the power of the group!

It’s never easy to embrace change, but we all have experienced changes that have brought about stronger success than working the way we did it before. Think about it: if Encyclopedia Britannica continued to do things the way they always have and did not start preparing for change, they would not have a second life. Preparing for the future and embracing the change it brings, will keep your career and your company viable.

This year, WhatTheyThink’s Going Green is busily coordinating the 4th Annual Environmental Innovation Awards, which honor and reward printing companies that have implemented creative, forward-thinking, and—perhaps most importantly—quantifiable environmental sustainability initiatives.

Sponsored by Unisource, the awards are presented in four categories:

• Environmental Sustainability and Your Plant recognizes a company that is making environmentally responsible changes to their own facility, such as implementing lean/green manufacturing, adding unique lighting or ventilation, etc.
• Environmental Sustainability and Your Processes recognizes a company that has environmentally transformed their processes by incorporating inks, papers, consumables, waste management, or recycling in new and different ways.
• Environmental Sustainability and Your Community recognizes a company that is takes environmental initiatives outside their own doors and offers “outreach” programs that support both the environment and their community.
• Beyond Environmental Sustainability recognizes a leading- or bleeding-edge solution involving unique creativity; for example, a biodiesel “still” to create alternative power sources or installation of wind or solar power.

There is also a fifth award, a special “Thought Leader” prize that recognizes a company which best represents the “new green graphic arts company” among all applicants. Each year, the recipient is a truly innovative, disruptively-creative company.

I encourage all printing companies who have “gone green”—whether you’re big or small, digital or traditional—to enter. There is no cost to apply, and applications can be downloaded (as Word docs) at the Environmental Innovation Awards page.

Last year, we recognized five companies that were leading the pack in sustainability:

• PrintingForLess, Livingston, MT (Environmental Sustainability and Your Plant) generates 100% of its power from a nearby wind farm, and their facility has been custom-designed to reduce energy and water consumption. They’ve dramatically reduced waste, and reinvested the cost savings from waste disposal to higher-cost wind power and other plant improvements. Their property also includes a preserved 25-acre wetland.




• Standard Register, Dayton, OH (Environmental Sustainability and Your Processes) initially participated in the Carbon Disclosure Project and used the results as a blueprint for their environmental programs. Their initiatives focused on generating zero hazardous waste, minimizing waste in general, taking advantage of waste-to-energy options, reducing energy use, and increasing community involvement.




• Patient News Publishing, Haliburton, Ontario, Canada (Environmental Sustainability and Your Community) has an environmental team, SCRAP (Strategic Consumable and Recycle Assessment Program), which develops and implements programs to assist company employees as well as community members and businesses with environmental sustainability.




• EarthColor, Inc., Parsippany, NJ (Beyond Environmental Sustainability) invests in cutting-edge technologies to reduce emissions, print on recyclable PET plastic, create patent-pending calculators to determine environmental savings and impact of their print supply chain, test print runs on “tree-free” papers, and, through carbon trading, help to further reduce their carbon footprint while providing income to private landowners and/or rural communities.




• Monroe Litho, Rochester, NY (Environmental “Thought Leader”) has a plant that is 100% wind-powered and monitors, manages, and explores 56 different initiatives relating to recycling, reuse, remanufacture, and re-thinking their environmental impact in all of their operations. In 2010, they reduced VOC emissions by 31% from 2009; recycled or recovered 1,250,000 pounds of paper, 2,155 pounds of cardboard, and 9,435 pounds of plastic strapping/wrapping materials; recycled 11,973 pounds of aluminum printing plates; recycled 2,825 pounds of used IT equipment; reduced water usage by 11.5%; and reduce diesel fuel for trucking by 30.7%.

In this age, when print as a medium is increasingly seen as environmentally damaging and people are urged to “go paperless” to avoid killing trees, we commend companies like the above for going the extra distance to show that printing companies can be conscientious and effective environmental stewards—and operate as highly successful businesses in the process.

The benefits of winning an Environmental Innovation Award include:

• Recognition among industry peers
• Mini-conference with sponsors on sustainability issues
• Expense-paid trip to Atlanta, GA, for awards presentation dinner hosted by WhatTheyThink and Unisource
• Physical award for in-plant display
• Video interview on WhatTheyThink
• Reprint rights to your video for marketing & Web use
• Press release on WhatTheyThink
• Blog post on WhatTheyThink’s Going Green
• Badge graphic for your website/blog

If you’re going beyond certification and mere compliance and are implementing some truly creative solutions, please apply for the 4th Annual WhatTheyThink Environmental Innovation Awards. You’ve done the hard work—don’t you think you should be rewarded and recognized for their efforts?

The history of computing since Day One has been to bring the computer physically closer to the user. Giant mainframes in computer centers were eventually scaled down to the desktop, and then compressed down to the laptop. Now, increasingly, our computer is the mobile device we carry around, be it a smartphone or a tablet. (Just to show how far we’ve come, here’s a link to an unintentionally funny photo of a 5MB hard drive from 1956—which weighed over a ton—being unloaded from a plane. It certainly puts that 2GB thumb drive into perspective …)

The next step, logically, would be wearable computers. And, actually, they have a very old legacy, dating back to the 1950s (although, one hastens to add, not with a 5MB hard drive). The “father of the wearable computer” is generally held to be Edward O. Thorpe, who, in 1955, conceived of a miniature computer that could predict roulette spins. He and M.I.T.’s Claude Shannon jointly constructed a working prototype and tested it out in Las Vegas in 1961, although a hardware glitch ended their betting prematurely, probably for the best, lest they fall afoul of casino owners who, uh, frown on that sort of thing.

If we’re simply talking about a small computer that can be attached to clothing, that exists already: the iPhone, iPod and related devices. Visit any gym or watch many runners and you’ll see these devices strapped to people’s arms as they work out. Apps designed for the iPod Nano, for example, can also help keep track of workouts and other fitness stats. Bluetooth and other wireless technologies can let the device interact with other peripherals, such as audio output devices.

But what about displays? Here’s one thought. In his 2006 novel Rainbows End, science-fiction author, futurist and speaker Vernor Vinge envisions the not-to-distant future of 2025 in which people (mostly young people) interact with the world through computers embedded in clothing that send images to contact lens-based displays. The “world” was experienced via what we today refer to as Augmented Reality. Computer apps changed the display and thus the view of the world the user was experiencing. (In the 1960s, I think they called this “LSD.”)

Far-fetched? Actually, many readers claimed that Vinge’s vision (as it were) was set too far in the future; that his “2025” would actually arrive much sooner than that. (In the January 2012 issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer takes a more skeptical look at the rate of technological progress.)

Still, 2025 vision edged closer to reality last November with the first successful test of a contact lens that had a built-in computer display. New Scientist wrote about the test, conducted on rabbits (which, I hasten to add, were not harmed):

The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit’s eye. To focus the light on the rabbit’s retina, the contact lens itself was fabricated as a Fresnel lens – in which a series of concentric annular sections is used to generate the ultrashort focal length needed.

The tests were conducted by a research team led by Babak Praviz at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the paper appears in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. Concludes the abstract:

In order to extend display capabilities, design and fabrication of micro-Fresnel lenses on a contact lens are presented to move toward a multipixel display that can be worn in the form of a contact lens. Contact lenses with integrated micro-Fresnel lenses were also tested on live rabbits and showed no adverse effect.

While I wonder what someone displays to a rabbit (maybe Night of the Lepus?), it’s not hard to imagine how this technology may soon  bring the computer, in the form of a mobile device, even closer to us than it is today. Those of us with smartphones are often glued to their displays, texting (sometimes while driving, proving that the phones are sometimes smarter than the users), interacting with location apps, checking out social media and many other things, including actual Augmented Reality. The integration of the display with our own eyes is merely the next logical step. While many of us—myself included—have a difficult time with contact lenses and get creeped out by the idea of putting things in our eyes, I suspect generations that are born “natively” to these things will have no such squeamishness.

And yet, that’s only the next step. The next question: at what point do computers become implanted in the body itself?

Leveraging Tablets for Your Business

In our first two installments of this blog post, we took a look at some of the reasons behind the recent trend toward tablet computers and compared several of the tablet choices currently in the marketplace.

With all that being said, the real question when it comes to tablets is: How can your business leverage this new technology for greater productivity and enhanced customer experience?

As we pointed out in part one of this blog, one of the key benefits of tablets is that they allow for wireless connectivity from any location through WiFi, 3G or 4G networks. This offers today’s growing mobile workforce agile and cost-effective access to network resources while away from the office. Whether giving a presentation, accessing a website or just checking email, tablets have a convenient functionality that supports business users on the go.

As you probably know, there are endless apps out there promising to help you get the most out of your tablet. Many of these are directed at personal use, but there are also quite a few that can help customize your tablet for business use. We thought it might be helpful to identify several well-received iPad apps you might want to consider. Similar apps are available for Android tablets and some of the others:

• Minimal Folio. This app allows you to upload images, PDFs and video. It arranges the content for you in columns and makes it possible for you to present your portfolio in a seamless, sleek presentation by swiping images from left to right.




• Chimpadeedoo. If you use MailChimp for email marketing, this app is for you. It lets you collect email addresses when you are not online and automatically pushes those addresses to your MailChimp list.




• Dropbox. This cloud storage utility lets you upload documents and keep them in sync no matter what device or computer you are using. Files can be shared via email and you can authorize access for others in the event you want to share particular files. There are 2 GB of free storage with several upgrade options.




• Cisco WebEx. Cisco offers this iPad client for its WebEx teleconferencing software. It works with GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Video is fluid over a WiFi connection and also works with 3G and 4G at a lower resolution.




• LogMeIn Ignition. Need to access your work or home computer from your iPad? This app will help you do it, giving you full control over your remote computer, and access to its applications, from you tablet. You can also transfer and save files between your computers and iPad.

Of course, these are just a few of the many apps that can help turn you tablet into a powerful tool to support your business, enhancing your productivity and allowing you one more way to interact with your customers and improve their experience. Identifying which apps are right for you will depend on your goals and how you choose to use your device.

With all of their advantages, it appears that tablets are here to stay. The challenge is to make sure your organization is leveraging the capabilities of this innovative technology to improve your business.

So are you using tablets in your business? We’d be interested to learn how tablets are helping you achieve your goals. And if you are using any of the apps mentioned above, let us know what you think of them! Leave us a comment below.

We’re feeling like proud parents at Ricoh. It’s my pleasure to share with you the news that our flagship digital color press, the RICOH Pro C901, has passed the rigorous testing of IDEAlliance’s Digital Press Certification Program.

This is huge news for us. By passing, we can ensure our customers that the RICOH Pro C901 meets specific print standards which IDEAlliance has deemed worthy of a highly capable digital color press. Thanks to the Digital Press Certification, IDEAlliance ensures that the RICOH Pro C901 meets or exceeds established industry tolerances for excellence in Colorimetric Accuracy, Uniformity, Repeatability, Durability and Registration.

To meet the requirements for digital press certification, IDEALLIANCE provided a series of tests forms, which our engineers produced from the Ricoh Pro C901 according to given criteria. We sent those printed forms to the designated Evaluation Contractor at IDEAlliance, where they measured and compared our outputs against pre-determined tolerances.

Now that our RICOH Pro C901 has passed the Digital Press Certification Program, you’ll begin to see IDEAlliance’s certification logo with our press, giving you confidence that the RICOH Pro C901 meets the standards set forth by IDEAlliance.

We have some big news to share with all of our readers. If you’ve followed us on YouTube, you know that we’ve been posting videos to help our customers grow their businesses and also experience the latest in Ricoh production printing technology.

Starting in this year, we’ll be moving all of our videos to Ricoh’s official YouTube channel at RicohTV. You can still find all of our content under the Ricoh Production Printing Video Playlist. To learn more, watch this video. Hope to see you at RicohTV!

In part one of this blog post, we discussed the many important factors behind the recent trend toward tablet computers. With a growing mobile workforce and the need for connectivity on the go, tablets offer a lightweight and convenient way to access a whole host of valuable resources from the internet.

Although the iPad still commands over 70 percent of the tablet market, there are plenty of other tablet options out there—and the list is growing by the day. So let’s take a quick look at the tablet landscape and some of the features to consider:

• iPad 2

  Of course, Apple has led the way in the tablet market with the introduction of the iPad and now the second generation iPad 2. The iPad 2 is thinner and lighter than the first generation, yet has a faster processor and a 10-hour battery life. In addition to Wi-Fi, the iPad 2 has 3G options from AT&T and Verizon. One thing worth noting for business users, the HDMI, USB and SD ports all require adaptors. Starting price: Under $500.00

• Blackberry Playbook

  RIM’s entry in the tablet market has a compact 7-inch screen and integrates Adobe Flash for a desktop-style Web experience. It has advanced multitasking features and a 10-hour battery life as well. In addition to Wi-Fi, connectivity options include LTE and HSPA+. Starting price: Under $400 (Blackberry offered a Black Friday deal on the Playbook at $199.00. With the holidays, additional tablet deals may be forthcoming)

• Samsung Galaxy Tab

  This Android tablet is as thin and even lighter than the iPad 2, perhaps in part due to its plastic back. Offering a 10.1-inch screen, it includes HPSA+ and Wi-Fi connectivity options. Like the Playbook, it also supports Adobe Flash. It has a 9-hour battery life for video.  Starting price: Under $500.00

• Sony Tablet S

  Also an Android tablet, the Tablet S has a 9.4-inch screen with a distinctive wedge shaped design. It has a micro-USB and full-sized SD card reader. It supports Wi-Fi wireless networking only and has a battery life of approximately 8 hours. Starting price: Under $500.00

• Asus Eee Pad Transformer

  With a 10.1-inch display, this Android tablet has a slim, lightweight design. Like Sony’s Tablet S, it supports Wi-Fi networking only. It has a microSD card slot, a mini-HDMI port and a 40-pin connector for charging the battery or PC data transfer. Asus also offers an optional keyboard docking station, which will give you about 16 hours of battery life. Starting price: Under $400.00

• Amazon Kindle Fire

  A recent entrant into the tablet market, the Kindle Fire has a 7-inch screen and, like the Kindle e-readers, uses Amazon’s Whispersync technology to sync Amazon libraries in addition to supporting Wi-Fi.  It has a 7.5 hour battery life for video. Starting price: Under $200.00

• Barnes & Noble Nook

  Another new Android option, the Nook, has a 7-inch screen and supports Wi-Fi networking and Adobe Flash. It has 9 hours of battery life with video and a microSD memory card slot. Starting price: Under $250.00.

As you can see, you have many choices these days when it comes to tablets! The right choice will depend on a number of factors and your preferences, including screen size, connectivity options and memory requirements.

In our next blog installment, we’ll discuss how businesses are leveraging tablet technology for greater productivity and enhanced customer experience. If you’ve used any of the tablets mentioned here, we’d love to hear about your experience. Please share in the comments.

If you have been to any industry event or read the trade press in the past two or three years, you know that inkjet printing is one of the hot topics (if not the hot topic) being bruited about today. However, for all of the advantages it holds for print providers, the impending growth of large-scale commercial inkjet printing has an environmental downside that researchers are busy trying to solve before inkjet volume swells. This problem was also the topic du jour at a brace of European conferences held in early November, the CTP’s Technical Conference on Deinking of Digital Prints in Grenoble and IMI’s 19th European Ink Jet Printing Conference in Lisbon.

The environmental problem—or, more correctly, the recycling problem—that inkjet poses is that of deinking (or de-inking, if you prefer that spelling) printed paper for recycling. We tend not to think about this, but when paper mills recycle paper, they have to get rid of the ink somehow.

With offset printing, which still accounts for between 90% and 95% of all paper recovered for recycling, the deinking process is not especially problematic, thanks to the fact that what makes the lithographic process work (the use of hydrophobic, or water-repellent, ink) also helps the deinking process because paper fibers are hydrophilic (water-absorbent). In one of the most common deinking processes, called froth flotation, recovered paper is mixed with water where it dissolves and is re-pulped into a slurry. Chemicals such as soaps or lye (NaOH) are used to swell the paper fibers and dislodge particles of ink and other matter. When ink is hydrophobic, that’s not especially troublesome, since the particles are easy to “shoo” off water-laden paper fibers. Air is then blown into the mixture to form bubbles containing the particulates, which can then be skimmed off. The process is repeated a few times and you’re left with clean white paper pulp.

Another, simpler method is called wash deinking in which dispersants are added to the slurry to shoo or “wash” the ink and other particles off the paper fibers and the slurry is then filtered to remove the particles. The deinking process that paper mills use has been developed for both offset and gravure inks.

Enter digital printing. Toner has presented its own problems over the years, especially so-called “liquid toners,” but inkjet is where the real trouble lies. Unlike offset and other commercial inks, inkjet inks are typically water-based. They are hard to remove with current deinking processes, can contaminate the entire recycling system, and irreparably stain the paper fibers. A fitting analogy is doing laundry and mixing bright colors with whites—we’ve all had a brand new red shirt turn white socks or underpants a lovely shade of pink (usually the day before gym class…). So a lot of research is being done to try to develop a deinking process that can handle inkjet. Compounding the problem is that the process will have to handle all kinds of printing inks. After all, getting consumers, recyclers, and/or paper mills to separate offset and digitally printed papers is not going to happen.

At present, inkjet accounts for a very small percentage of overall volume of reclaimed paper sent for recycling, but as WhatTheyThink and other industry publications have written at great length, that may very well change. A recent article in Printweek said:

Research body InfoTrends said it believed inkjet currently contributes around 7% of digital print volume in document printing, but the growth of production output is likely to increase the overall inkjet share to 13% by 2015. This could lead to a tenfold increase in the amount of inkjet print in the recycled waste stream, rising from 0.05% to 0.5% by 2015.

The article covered the two conferences cited earlier, pointing out that almost two dozen studies have been released examining how to improve the inkjet deinking process.

The DPDA-sponsored (the Digital Print Deinking Alliance) studies outlined how improvements can be made through changing deinking conditions; however, Fischer was sceptical about the feasibility of making changes to the current mill deinking model of flotation.

“Everything you do for inkjet will reduce the yield for offset,” he said, explaining that the current process has been developed for the hydrophobic ink properties of offset print, which makes up 90% of the waste stream going into these mills. Making changes to accommodate hydrophillic inkjet reduces the overall yield, and creates more waste because the fibres themselves are hydrophillic.

The paper industry has been focusing on the deinking process itself, but other efforts have been looking further upstream, such as developing inkjet inks that are more deinking friendly or substrate coatings that facilitate the deinking process.

Two organizations leading the way are INGEDE (founded in 1989 by European paper manufacturers as the International Association of the Deinking Industry) and the Digital Print Deinking Alliance (DPDA). Earlier this year, both of them signed a letter of collaboration and are jointly conducting more research on deinking processes. (The DPDA had some early success last year.) Still, progress has been slow.

Using recycled grades is one of the easiest and often most cost-effective means of “greening” the printing process. If inkjet volume does grow as substantially as many industry experts forecast, then making inkjet printing compatible with recycling processes is of paramount importance.

Richard Romano is managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Going Green, and is a writer and analyst for the graphic communications industry.