OUTPUT

Sign and display printing certainly has its fair share of environmental issues, whether it be solvent inks, PVC substrates or a lack of recycling in the industry in general. However, perhaps the single biggest environmental problem in sign and display is rarely talked about.

By some estimates, up to 30 percent of point-of-sale signage (POS) is destroyed without ever having been used. It's an incredible statistic, but it's one that I have come to believe more over time as I have heard a growing list of anecdotal evidence. One US sign and display industry analyst once told me two stories stemming from some primary research that he had done. The first related to a leading department store that crudely estimated that they never used 25 percent of the POS signs that they had printed, and the other about a beer distributor who sometimes discarded large consignments of POS signs unopened because they weren't sure what to do with them. POS signage waste really does seem to be the environmental 'elephant in the room'.

So just why might the levels of waste be so high? Much of it seems to stem from printing in long runs in a single location, hoping that the sign that's right for the store in Northampton is also right for the one in Southampton, guessing how much of each type of sign every store needs, assuming that they will arrive in time, relying on local staff to know just what to do with the signs and believing that it will be safer to order more signs than are really needed.

This behaviour is partly driven by the economics of traditional printing technologies such as screen and offset. High set-up costs – but relatively low incremental costs for printing more signs – encourage printing of long runs of identical signs in a single run and distributing from a central point. What is often poorly understood is the waste and costs that this behaviour drives, whether it be in terms of transport, storage or just disposing of the surfeit of unwanted signs.

It need not be like this. Increasingly, the technology is available to print short runs of signs better customised to local needs, closer to the point of end use: digital printing technology.

St Ives, which describes itself as 'the UK's leading POS printing business and Europe's largest digital print specialist', spoke at a conference that I attended in Geneva a couple of months back, and they had some fascinating things to say. They mentioned that leading retailers such as Marks and Spencer had asked them for help in reducing waste in their POS signage, and that they in turn were also now approaching other retailers with an offer to help them to reduce their POS signage waste – and to share the savings. In effect, they are making a business out of helping retailers to print less. It seems that taming the elephant in the room can be beneficial for all concerned.