Going green benefits readers and advertisers in the long run

Reading a newspaper in India is equivalent to travelling one km by car or four km by a motorbike, assuming that the mileage of a car is 12 km/ litre of petrol that of a motorbike is 50 km/ litre. It was an interesting point made by WAN-IFRA’s Anand Srinivasan when he spoke at the organisation’s 22nd Conference in Delhi recently. He added that reading a printed magazine and an Internet-based one generated the same amount of greenhouse gases. Now, when about 2.5 billion people around the world read newspapers in print and 800 million read them on digital platforms, we know how we are contributing to degradation of our environment. So, is there a way out?

Yes, there are ways but it will take concerted and continuous efforts by all, especially by those in charge of newspaper production. According to the Print Process Champions Group, France, there are broadly ten parameters that have to be seriously considered: energy efficiency, paper efficiency, water consumption, developer consumption, ink consumption, washing solvent consumption, dampening solution consumption, cardboard packing consumption, PE film packing consumption and liquid waste generation. In other words, the focus has to be constantly on a range of areas that can be broadly classified under raw material usage, lower power consumption and reduce waste generation. The big plus is that going green lowers costs, which in the long term can prove attractive to both readers and advertisers.