“It’s almost a catastrophe,” said Markus Kaufmann, Managing Director at Druckhaus Kaufmann in the Black Forest. The delivery times for paper across Europe are “like never before, now up to six months instead of two to four weeks”. All representatives of the printing industry at a webinar earlier this week confirmed this. Markus Hutter, Managing Director of Hutter Druck in St. Johann in Tirol, said: “Despite full order books, we cannot print everything.” For three months they have had an order for 300,000 tourism brochures in-house. “We won’t get the paper for it until December 19th.”
The managing director of the OÖN print shop in Pasching, Ronald Sonnleitner, groans under the paper shortage. It was brought about by broken cycles, including lockdowns. Less paper was printed, less was recycled, and at the same time the packaging industry withdrew waste paper for online trading (packaging). According to Sonnleitner, paper prices have risen by 90 percent since the beginning of 2021. The prices for recovered paper have doubled.
Despite this difficult procurement situation, many print shops are dedicated to the topic of sustainability. “We print 35 million package inserts for the pharmaceutical industry. They now want everything to be climate-neutral,” reports Hutter. The industry defends itself against the image of just cutting down trees and thus being “climate-unfriendly”. “79 percent of the paper is recycled, 100 percent for newspapers,” said Torsten Froh, Sustainability Manager at Gratenau & Hesselbacher. Axel Fischer from the recycling association Ingede in Munich pointed it out: “There is no product whose cycle is as tight as that of paper. It is possible that your newspaper will be a new newspaper again next week.”
The printers do not accept the argument that there is no paper involved in online advertising or online news. The resource consumption of the Internet (electricity, cooling) and the end devices would never be taken into account. “And where does the iPad recycling happen? It is burned in the open field in Africa and scratched out by children,” said Fischer. Nevertheless, printing companies could better avoid waste and use more sustainable auxiliary materials.
Source: Nachrichten
