I purchased my first “Boxed Water” a few years ago at an airport food outlet, mainly out of curiosity … being a paper guy! But when I read the messaging on the box, I thought to myself, “Finally, somebody out there gets it!” The claims were factual and accurate – but also took advantage of the great sustainable features of paper products (see photo on the right). I decided to have a conversation with Rob Koenen, the Chief Marketing Officer for Boxed Water.
The Mission for Boxed Water is: “To provide a better alternative to bottled water that allows us to give back to water and forestation foundations.” The idea was born in April of 2009, when founder, Ben Gott, decided there had to be a better alternative to plastic water bottles. The brand is built on three principles: Better Product, Better Packaging, Better Purpose.
Phil Riebel: The messaging on Boxed Water prominently features the sustainable qualities of paper-based packaging. How did this come about and why did the founders focus on this to brand the product?
Rob Koenen: Boxed Water was founded in 2009 with the belief that sustainability matters. We obsess over delivering the purest water in the most sustainable way. We saw a need for sustainably packaged water after seeing the ill effects plastic was having on our planet. Did you know that 68% of plastic bottles are not recycled? [1] When you don’t have a refillable bottle with you, we are a great alternative since our carton is made from mostly paper, a renewable resource.
PR: How has the messaging been received by the public at large and those in the packaging world?
RK: Our consumers want to engage with Boxed Water. You can see on our social media channels, most of our content comes from people sharing Boxed Water in their daily life. With both the public and packaging professionals, our carton prompts discussion. The packaging industry seems to be inspired by our simple carton. From when we started in 2009, we’ve led a new category in the beverage industry with sustainably packaged water.
PR: How does Boxed Water support sustainable forestry and the environmental performance of the packaging industry in North America?
RK: The paper from our cartons is sourced from trees in well-managed forests where new trees are continuously planted to replace the ones harvested. Sustainability is also about giving back. In addition to supporting the industry’s sustainable forest management practices, we launched our ReTree project[2] through which we have worked with the National Forest Foundation to plant trees in the Sierra National Forest, Stanislaus National Forest, and Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Our goal is to plant 1 million trees by 2020, and we are more than halfway to that goal. We’ve planted enough trees to offset our CO2 production 3 times in 1 year.
PR: Are there any next steps to improve the environmental performance of your product?
RK: We always look for ways to improve. Our mission is to change the way water is packaged, shipped, and enjoyed. We recently opened a second facility in Utah to fill and distribute our water to more areas with less of a carbon footprint. We also work with the Carton Council to advocate for more carton recycling facilities. Currently more than 60% of the country has household access to carton recycling.[3]
PR: How has the product performed compared to plastic bottles from a competitive/pricing point of view?
RK: There is a reason there are so many plastic bottles on the market; they are inexpensive to produce. People have shown that they want a sustainable option. Our water is priced at a level comparable to other premium water brands, which people purchase to make a statement. Our water allows them to make a statement that our planet is important.
Join us on social media to congratulate Boxed Water on their great message. You can reach them via Twitter and Facebook. For more, click here.
Sources:
Source: www.za.twosides.info
New infographics released by Two Sides North America highlights the most impactful results from U.S. consumer surveys conducted between 2015 and 2018 by the organisation and Toluna, a global polling firm.
The series of infographics is centred around the theme ‘Why Do So Many People Love Print On Paper?’
One infographic focuses on the fact that the majority of Americans feel that print on paper is safe and secure, sustainable and trusted. ‘Overall the survey results are very positive in favour of print and paper, in some cases surprisingly so. Although we regularly hear corporations tout going digital or ‘paperless’ as safe, secure and more green – this is clearly not a shared opinion by a large majority of the public who seem to trust paper for many applications,’ said Phil Riebel, president Two Sides North America.
The infographic is designed to bust key myths about the switch from paper to digital and further expose unsubstantiated and misleading corporate claims about print and paper. For example, the infographic spotlights key facts, including:
Two Sides’ new infographics can be downloaded here.
Source: www.africaprint.com
Although printing as an industry has been around for centuries, it has only survived this long by constantly reinventing itself and finding new ways to be more creative, effective and efficient. Kemtek is at the forefront of labelling and printing innovations in South Africa, and here we share our predictions for key trends in 2018.
2018 will see a continuation of some of the trends and innovations that gained momentum last year, but are likely to attain critical mass during the next 12 months. While there are always risks as well as rewards in being an early adopter, being last is never a good survival strategy, either.
We can state with a high degree of confidence that the labelling and printing industry will see further consolidation during 2018. However, it is likely to be a case of survival of the fastest, rather than the fittest. That is, those companies which are agile and receptive to new technologies will survive, while more cumbersome ‘dinosaurs’ may become extinct.
Closely linked to this trend is the increasing importance of automation. Printing presses are now more likely to be controlled by computers, and operating them is more about a mouse and keyboard rather than levers and a wrench. Companies that resist automation (perhaps out of fear) are unlikely to be able to offer the cost-savings that their more technophile competitors can.
Specialist, niche labelling and printing houses will always survive, but the middle ground will become hotly contested territory, and there won’t be room for everyone.
Although computers are not the exclusive preserve of the young, there is a pressing need in the labelling and printing industry to recruit the next generation. Look around you: how many millennials do you see? A clue: they’re the ones who see trends and innovations as exciting, rather than threatening. Recruitment and training will be major themes in 2018.
Consumer demands and the need to cut costs will drive much of the change we will see this year. Sustainability is now a huge challenge, especially as we are in an industry that creates some of the products that fuel the ‘throw-away culture’. Correcting this by using recycled (and more easily recyclable) materials will be a major trend in 2018 and beyond; innovative technologies like biopolymers will also play their part.
Consumers are already resistant to excessive packaging, so we will need to rethink how we wrap, box and protect our clients’ products. Environmental sustainability is now intrinsically linked to profitability – going green helps you stay in the black.
The value and power of brands will only increase throughout 2018, and clients will become ever more protective of their intellectual property (IP) – their most valuable asset. This will be reflected in even less tolerance for printing errors such as poor colour reproduction or register.
Making the most of the space on product packaging (while still decluttering – another key trend in 2018) will become more difficult due to increased government regulation of consumer products. The labelling industry will need to find new ways to add information on sugar content, calories, carbon footprint and the like, without creating labels that turn off shoppers.
From the extreme example of cigarette boxes through to ‘traffic lights’ on food packaging, as well as the aforementioned trend towards automation, 2018 could be the year that robots really make their mark in printing and labelling.
Source: https://kemtek.co.za/news/major-labelling-printing-trends-innovations-2018/
Not a week goes by that we don’t hear of another digital printer manufacturer making the switch to LED curing technology for ultra-violet (UV) inks. In the digital printing arena, this is more common for wide format digital print engines. UV-curable inks stick to pretty much any nonabsorbent substrate including paper and board, wood, PVC, glass, metals and ceramics. They produce minimal VOCs so they don’t need expensive exhaust systems.
The arguments in favour of using LEDs instead of conventional mercury arc curing systems for UV ink curing get more compelling as technology advances and as more developers follow EFI’s lead and go for the LED alternative.
In part the rise of LED curing technologies is due to the market’s acceptance of UV-curable inks. Unlike conventional inks, UV inks do not dry through evaporation, but rather must be changed into a solid surface that sits on top of the substrate. A UV light source heats the printed inks, which contain photoinitiators and other ingredients. The heat causes photoplymers in the ink to cross link and form a solid layer. The ink sits on the substrate surface rather than being partially absorbed into it, so these inks can have much larger and more intense colour gamuts than conventional offset inks. They are also instantly dry so the prints can move straight into finishing, storage or be readied for shipping. This can hit the bottom line, in that it means faster throughput in the plant and ultimately more jobs on press.
And LEDs are cheaper than mercury bulbs, lasting for several years instead of two or three which is the case with the mercury lamps. LEDs are far kinder to fragile substrates than mercury arc lamps, they use less energy, don’t have to warm up before they start working and they can be switched off when there is no curing to be done. They also pose no risk if they fail, unlike mercury arc lamps which involve glass and mercury and lots of heat.
The thing mercury arc lamps have going for them is their sheer intensity and power, which means curing takes place very, very quickly. For high productivity environments where absolute top notch quality output must be produced at speed, mercury arc curing is still the preferred choice for some manufacturers, such as Inca. However, it’s just a matter of time before LED technology advances such that it makes sense for all manufacturers make the switch.
– Laurel Brunner
There’s been heightened interest of late in the effectiveness of the printed word. It started with direct mail associations finding higher response rates to print than to electronic equivalents. Printed book sales in developed markets are outpacing e-book sales. And even the newspaper industry is still seeing 60% of revenues coming from print. According to Michael Golden, vice-chairman of the New York Times, who spoke at the recent Wan-Ifra World Publishing Expo, ‘readers have stayed with print and they are paying an increasing price for it’.
This is unsurprising for a couple of very basic reasons. As well as the content it carries, print is perceived as the product and we like to buy stuff. Print satisfies our urge for things we can actually hold in our hands. We appreciate print’s physicality, its tangibility and its convenience. That printed paper is also recyclable because it is based on renewable resources is an added bonus that can soothe our troubled eco-consciences.
These are all well rehearsed and compelling arguments for print, made since the emergence of electronic media in the last century. And it was always the case that as the novelty of electronic media wears off, people could choose to return to print. The question is, are they returning in sufficient numbers to sustain modern publishing business models?
In this ever more splintered communications environment, it might be that electronic media may actually be starting to drive consumers back to print. Increasing numbers of people choose to trust an editor or publisher to curate their content for them. Many of us prefer to look at a row of books on the shelf (or piles on the floor), instead of admiring a lone electronic device. Even when attractively accessorised with a dangling power supply and the tease of a flashing LED, the joyless aesthetics of an e-book simply don’t cut it.
Consumers, especially of newspapers, prefer to trust a brand rather than rely on a platform with no commitment to content integrity whatsoever, and commercial motives based on traffic and not probity. The whole fake news discussion overlooks the fact that information is a tool wielded to support a specified objective no matter how morally suspect. Social media platforms want to drive engagement and interaction in order to deliver audience numbers for advertising and nothing more. They claim a social purpose, but the real purpose is commercial and their users are unwitting raw material for a highly profitable business model. Social media platforms are not in the business of driving fact based debate or encouraging information that supports the public interest. They are in the ad sales business.
That people embrace fake news at all should remind us that in the words of Arthur Hays Sulzberfer, a former publisher of the New York Times, that ‘along with responsible newspapers, we must have responsible readers’. Print readers can take comfort in the fact that they not only have a better chance of being able to trust a more expensive and substantial medium, but they can also trust that the medium itself is recyclable.
The Verdigris Project is supported by Agfa Graphics, EFI, Epson, FESPA, HP, Kodak, Kornit, Practical Publishing, Ricoh, Spindrift, Splash PR, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.
– www.africaprint.com
