Eco-Friendly Photography & Design: When Being Green is Better

I believe that eco-responsibility is something that extends to all of us. Unfortunately I still don't hear photographers, graphic designers, and general business owners talk about it enough. Or talk is all they do. We all share the same planet, breath the same air, and these commonalities bond all of us. We are all ecological neighbors on this world. As a photographer and graphic designer I have wondered about things I can do to decrease my carbon footprint and try to become more eco conscience.

Print design has the potential to use large amounts of paper; particularly during the proofing process. Despite having monitors, print designers often have to see how each image or each layout might look on different media. We experiment with textures of media, weights, colors, acidities, and varying opacities. We have to be more conscience of our waste. We have to start exercising a higher degree of mental retention and write and record what works and what doesn’t instead of increasing the size of our landfills. We have to think about the amount of ink we use and try to reduce our use of inks with toxins that can harm the environment such as lead based inks. The recycling of empty ink cartridges is a start and disposing of them in the proper way is extremely beneficial. Email more proofs instead of using paper. 

Consistency is important in this business and our responsibility to give our clients a perfectly repeatable image and message is tied to our success as designers and photographers. There is a high degree of variance that can come with proofing from monitors and different printers but we can limit our paper proofing a little until we’re near the final designs, where color is consistency becomes more critical. Buying a series of printers with a recognized standardization on color is a beginning to reducing paper waste. Using energy efficient equipment and turning off our monitors and computers when they’re not in continued use is a start. Requesting recycled paper when possible for our large less critical print jobs is a huge bonus. 

Even as a web developer I’ve searched for different things and I discovered a web host that harnesses wind power to run their servers while others are utilizing solar energy. I had never heard of such an ingenious solution being applied to such high technology and I have plans to use these hosts for upcoming web projects when plausible. 

We have a great responsibility but also a wonderful opportunity to do some amazing things.