Cutting paper use – ProteusLife Magazine is now digital
“Something had to change, we needed to find a more environmentally friendly way to share our leadership magazine.”
Everyone loves to hold a physical copy of a magazine in their hands and the smell of freshly pressed ink but do we stop to think about the environmental cost for this luxury? We finally came to the conclusion that the benefits of a digital publication outweighed the nostalgic qualities of a traditionally printed magazine.
To give you an idea of the impact of each edition we broke it down to the following, each printed magazine has 52 pages and with our large distribution network we would generally run off around 6 thousand copies. 3 thousand copies would be mailed out with a shipping slip and enclosed in an envelope. It would then be sent out through our mail house and posted out all over the country. All the emissions generated by the delivery vehicles and the trees that were chopped down were not sitting well with our environmental consciousness. Something had to change. We needed to find a more environmentally friendly way to share our leadership magazine.
So we had determined that we needed to make change and the next step was to create a product that would replicate a physical magazine but take advantage of the digital publication technologies available to us. With the recent uptake in smart phones and digital tablets, we decided to go with an amazing flip book application. By utilising this software we are able to continue to build the magazine as we had done previously with lots of colourful images and designs.
The end product we produced was perfect. When you load the magazine on your tablet, sit down on a comfortable chair, put your feet up and flip through the digital pages, the experience held up to our high expectations. We would argue that the magazine was actually enhanced! We now have the ability to embed rich media content like Videos, Audio, links, animations, dynamic content and more.
We wanted to share this case study with you in hope that it inspires others to think outside of the cardboard box and discover what can be done in your office to minimise your carbon footprint. As a by-product you may even improve your products, services or systems by evoking this change.
Now that we have implemented this digital publication we are looking at further ways that we can look at minimise our paper consumption and carbon footprint in our offices around Australia.
*624,000 A3 sheets is based on 52 page magazine with 6,000 copies 4 times a year.
** 12,480,000 litres of water based on 10 litres of water is used to produce an A4 sheet of paper – theworldcounts.com/stories/paper-waste-facts
**** 120kg of ink was calculated with offset printing ink calculator based on 624,000 A3 sheets is based on 52 page magazine with 6,000 copies 4 times a year.
