Posted under Express 238, Express 76

Love Paper and the Power of the Printing Press

 

By Ken Hickson

 

Call me a Paper Boy, if you like. Because I haven’t stopped believing in the power of the printing press and the true value of the printed word, whether it be in the form of a letter, postcard, newspaper, magazine, book, newsletter, poster or parcel.

 

In my youth, I did deliver the local newspaper by cycling nine miles, six days a week around a country town in New Zealand. On leaving school, I started out on a career as a journalist for the afternoon metropolitan newspaper in Wellington, New Zealand.

 

As I hold a print copy of the Straits Times in my hands every day for my breakfast time reading in Singapore, I do wonder how many others are doing the same.  Yes, there’s been a decline in newspaper sales over recent years and the printing presses compete with television, radio and online sources of news and information.

 

But we are still seeing that printed books – and magazines, for that matter – are holding their own against the digitalisation of information.

 

We do hear that US publishers of books in all formats made almost US$26 billion in revenue last year, with print making up $22.6 billion and e-books taking $2.04 billion. That’s according to the Association of American Publishers’ annual report 2019, which includes trade and educational books, as well as fiction.

 

Besides being an economic advantage, there must be other things going for print books to beat the challenge from eBooks.

 

Let’s see what science comes up with to show that reading real books is good for the brain and health generally.

 

There are  “Seven Scientific Benefits of Reading Printed Books”, according to an article published on Mental Floss website, described as a destination for curious people. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/554845/7-scientific-benefits-reading-printed-books

 

1. You absorb more information: Readers of print books absorb and remember more of the plot than readers of e-books do, according to a study that was presented in Italy in 2014.

 

2. Children become better readers: A study of young children reveals they had lower comprehension of the story when their parents read to them from an e-book as opposed to a print book. Researchers theorize this arises because children get distracted by the electronic device.

 

3. Books are easier on the eyes: One survey of 429 university students revealed that nearly half had complained of strained eyes after reading digitally. Electronic books can cause screen fatigue, which may lead to blurred vision, redness, dryness, and irritation.

 

4. You’re less likely to get distracted: When reading e-books, you tend to get side-tracked more easily. According to one survey, 67% of university students were able to multitask while reading digitally, compared to 41% of print readers.

 

5. Books help you sleep better: Studies show that the blue light from your screen can toy with your melatonin levels and circadian cycles, making it harder for you to fall asleep. So if you’re hoping to get a good night’s rest, go to bed with a good book. Print, of course.

 

6. Having a library at home is linked to higher academic achievement:  Students who have books at home are more likely to score higher on tests, according to a study of readers from 42 countries. Researchers believe this encourages children to read for fun and talk to their parents about what they’ve learned, which only stands to benefit them in the classroom.

 

7. Books amplify the joy of reading: One recent study of college students in the US, Slovakia, Japan, and Germany showed that 92% of participants preferred actual books that they can hold, touch and leaf through whenever they please. Students cited fewer distractions and less eye strain as a couple of the reasons why they prefer printed materials, but other explanations were related to how books make them feel.

 

The Metal Floss article also referred readers to US Paper & Packaging “How life unfolds” .

 

If that’s not enough to reinforce the value of books in print, we can also call on the Two Sides organisation, which operates in  Europe and North America.

 

Its approach is to provide facts and data to show how the print and paper industry is investing in sustainability right across its various activities.

 

By uniting the graphic communications supply chain, led by sustainable and responsible forestry, paper production and printing, it aspires to ensure that, in a world of scarce resources, print and paper’s unique recyclable and renewable qualities can be enjoyed for generations to come.

 

Two Sides is further committed to ensuring that print and paper also remains a versatile, effective and powerful means of marketing and communication, stretching the imagination and imparting knowledge.

 

Starting in the United Kingdom, it mounted a “Love Paper” global campaign to promote the sustainable and attractive attributes of print, paper and paper packaging. It seeks to tell consumers around the world all the positive stories about paper, print and paper packaging from its environmental credentials to its role in the creative process.

 

Read all about it here:  https://www.twosides.info/UK/love-paper-campaign-features-across-national-publications/

 

Which brings us to the role played throughout the world by PEFC – the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification – and what’s underway in Singapore to get its Chain of Custody certification programme fully operational.

 

As a big consumer of imported materials – including pulp and paper – Singapore is being encouraged to become a centre of influence, committed to responsible procurement from the Asian region’s forests and plantations.

This was the message from Ben Gunneberg, PEFC International CEO, when he visited Singapore in September 2019 and spoke to 50 representatives from government agencies, think tanks, industry bodies, certification bodies, private sector companies and media.

It also marked the launch of PEFC’s Chain of Custody certification scheme, now recognised by the Singapore Accreditation Council (SAC), which is managed by Enterprise Singapore and the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

Mr Gunneberg gave an overview of PEFC’s work and stressed that sustainable forest management can contribute to meeting social, economic and environmental challenges, as well as helping countries and companies to address all 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

With 17 million hectares of forests certified in Asia, it’s the fastest growing region for PEFC. He also pointed out that there’s a lot of room to grow responsible sourcing in countries like Singapore, which has only 22 Chain of Custody certificate holders out of a total 1421 throughout Asia.

Chain of Custody certification in Singapore can be incorporated into private and public sector procurement policies, demonstrating support for sustainably managed forests and meeting Sustainability Development Goals.

It also enables companies to meet legality issues and customer expectations, as well as introduce traceability solutions into the supply chain.

Besides certification of wood for buildings and furniture, there’s the opportunity to greatly increase the use of certification – and the PEFC logo - for publishing, printing, paper and packaging, where Singapore has made an encouraging start.

There is recognition at home and abroad that Singapore has a flourishing printing and publishing industry.

 

The opportunity now exists for PEFC to work with the Print and Media Association to promote the use of responsibly-sourced paper and create greater awareness in the eyes of the wider community of the value of paper as a sustainably-produced material.

 

There’s no reason why Singapore couldn’t mount something similar to the UK’s Love Paper campaign which stresses that  paper and paper packaging are increasingly recognised for their unique sustainable features: made from renewable raw materials, recyclable and biodegradable.

 

 

A former print journalist (newspapers and magazines) who continues to be a strong advocate for paper and print, Ken Hickson is the author of six books (all in print), including one entitled “Race for Sustainability” published by World Scientific in Singapore in 2013 – the first book in Asia to be PEFC-certified. He is currently producing a book for the 40^th Anniversary of the Lions Home for the Elders, which he insists will be a PEFC-certified production in Singapore and will be launched at the Lions International Convention at Marina Bay Sands in June 2020, attracting 20,000 overseas visitors. Ken also serves as the Sustainability and Communications Consultant to PEFC in Singapore.

Posted under Express 238

Australia is Burning – Now it must change

 

By Geraldine Brooks

In FT Weekend

10 January 2020

 

When I fly home to Sydney out of a northern winter, the thing that always strikes me first, the thing I look forward to, is the light. That crisp blue, arc-light brightness. The shimmering air, rinsed by thousands of miles of uninterrupted ocean.

Not this year. In December, I stepped out of the international terminal into the foyer of hell.

Grey smoke swathed my city. A dandruff of fine ash fell on my shoulders, caught in my throat.

That same day, not so far away, a friend took refuge on the beach as a finger of fire raced through the bush towards her home.

That’s OK, she thought, we can fight that. But the narrow rill of flame was just the precursor to the blazing wall that roared up behind it — an inferno 30 metres high. Another friend, evacuated from the mud-brick bush house he’d built side by side with his young sons over many years, waited anxiously for news as the Rural Fire Service volunteers — the fireys, as Aussies call them — battled ember attacks that showered down in a parody of the rain that hasn’t fallen here.

Ember attacks. Finger of fire. Watch and wait. Too late to leave. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds. Dry lightning.

These are the new phrases in our vocabulary. And the people who speak them are different Australians to the familiar ones I’m used to coming home to in summer — the tanned, sanguine mates sharing funny stories as the sausage sizzles.

We’ve never been an anxious, angry people. But this summer, we are fraught, and many of us are furious.

Nervously, we check the Fires Near Me app to see how friends and family are faring. A broadcaster, called back from holiday to do emergency coverage, tells me he takes a bucket into the studio so he won’t have to abandon the microphone if he throws up from the sickening air.

Heckling and abuse greet the prime minister, Scott Morrison, when he finally visits the fire lines after his appalling decision to head off on vacation to Hawaii.

When I was in my early teens, I read John Wyndham’s post-apocalypse novel, The Chrysalids. In it, one of the characters keens for her devastated planet: “What did they do here? What can they have done to create such a frightful place? . . . There was the power of gods in the hands of children, we know: but were they mad children, all of them quite mad?”

That passage has been running through my head as I look at the unbearable images of blackened farms and bushland, the places where horses and sheep met horrible deaths and more than half a billion native animals are said to have perished.

Fireys speak of being haunted by the screams of dying koalas. I think of the less charismatic species — our glossy snakes and the blue tongue lizards, countless insects with their crucial role in the web of life. And the gorgeous birds — our rainbow lorikeets, rosellas, superb parrots — falling dead out of the seared air.

For some of these species, this will be the end. An extinction-level event.

Will this change us? Will this strange, robotic prime minister, most famous before this tragedy for bragging about his cruel policies on refugees and for fondling a lump of coal in Federal Parliament, be able to lead us away from the destructive priorities and profligate habits that have brought us to this place?

It seems unlikely. I am a novelist, so in my mind I create a character like Wyndham’s in the aftermath of the climate apocalypse, looking back at the devastation, trying to fathom the madness that allowed it.

The country was burning, but they gave the go-ahead to the vast Adani coal mine. Their rivers were drying, but they flushed their toilets with drinking water.

They used the fossil fuels that were poisoning their planet to make plastic things that they used just once then threw in the oceans.

And yes, because I too am among this moment’s mad and guilty, they thought it was OK to fly around the planet, willy-nilly, just because they wanted to.

Machiavelli wrote that there “is nothing more difficult nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to conduct than to make oneself a leader in introducing a new order of things. For the man who introduces it has for enemies all who do well out of the old order.”

Morrison, with his beloved coal industry, and Rupert Murdoch, most particularly in his national daily The Australian, a once-fine paper largely reduced to a climate-denial propaganda sheet, have already amplified an alternative scenario. The fires aren’t caused by climate change: they’re caused by greenies who won’t let property owners clear their land or log in national parks.

At a time when we need massive tree planting (our fast-growing native trees being the most efficient carbon-capture device available) they are advocating for more tree felling.

But I choose hope. We’re a rich society and a decent people. Time and chance have made us custodians of a huge land mass and vast oceans.

Our national temperament leans away from the rugged individualism of the US towards a very different core belief: that we are in it together.

The belief that you don’t rise by putting your foot in your neighbour’s face, but by chucking a hand back and hauling her up with you.

And at this moment, that core national ethos might be the only one that can save the planet.

Because when it comes to climate change, we are, all of us, in it together.

So I hope we will get through this crisis and then channel all the pain, the anxiety and the anger into turning our country from climate laggard to climate leader.

We will figure out a just transition from coal to clean energy that brings affected workers and their communities along and doesn’t leave them behind.

We’ll call off the madness of new coal mines.

We’ll fully use our abundant sun and wind resources and become pioneers in new renewables such as hydrogen.

We’ll replant trees at an unprecedented rate and stop logging our old growth forests. We’ll re-embrace old Aussie values such as thrift and frugality instead of waste and extravagance.

An 18th-century rabbi, Nachman of Bratslav, put it best: “If you believe it is possible to destroy, then believe it is possible to repair.”

 

Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and formerly a foreign correspondent who calls from Australia home.  

 

Posted under Express 238

Livestock – cattle and sheep mostly – the world over are being blamed for the high level of greenhouse gas emissions coming from agriculture and food production. Reducing consumption of red meat and switching to a plant-based diet might be one answer. But New Zealand – as a major global supplier of meat and dairy products – is exploring how it can cut methane emissions from agriculture in other productive ways. We asked one of our Contributing Editors, Environmental Scientist Brook Wright, to update us on this:

Low Carbon Livestock – A path to low emissions future?

By Brook Wright

There has much discussion on decarbonising agriculture in New Zealand. As a primary sector economy with a large agricultural base, it is no surprise that the carbon budget is dominated by organic emissions.

At over 40% of total, this is an area that needs drastic attention, particularly if New Zealand is to achieve its short and long-term mitigation targets. (https://www.mfe.govt.nz/climate-change/climate-change-and-government/emissions-reduction-targets/about-our-emissions).

Fortunately, there has been a significant amount of investment in this space and institutions such as AgResearch and Massey University are working towards creating pragmatic and future proof solutions. From discovering the heritability of low carbon genes to quantifying methane production in livestock, these are the innovations that are needed for creating farm ready solutions.

Some of the more promising developments have been made in the area of low GHG feeds. Earlier in 2019, red seaweed (Asparagopsis armata) was championed as low emissions supplement.

Research indicated that red seaweed, when fed in small amounts (~1% of food consumed) could limit enteric methane production by up to 60%.

If this could be practically used across the entire national dairy heard, New Zealand would meet its short term decarbonisation goals almost overnight [1]. However, further research has proved that this effect is short lived. As it turns out, Methanogens (methane producing microbes) are crafty little things and quickly adapt to alternate feeds.

To achieve lower emission in livestock it might be as simple as changing secondary feeds. While pasture (grass fed) beef is generally more desirable than grain fed beef from consumer standpoint, cereal feeds such as maize and barley improve conversion efficiency and reduce methane production.

Its estimated that pasture has a GHG intensity of 22.4g CH₄/kg/dry matter intake, while Radish and Fodderbeetfare much better at 11.4 and 13.2g/kg/dry matter intake. So, diet management might be the best current short-term solution for combating on farm emissions.

The selective breeding approach has garnered more media attention. New Zealand Beef and Lamb announced early this month that they had made available a breeding value (BV) tool to farmers for the assessment of GHG production in sheep.

This tool was created as part of a collaborative exercise by The Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium (PGGRC), the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre (NZAGRC), and AgResearch, and represents more than 10 years of research and millions of dollars of investment.

Farmers can now evaluate their flocks using portable accumulation chambers and make decisions on which of their sheep are high emitters and which are not. The collection of this data is used to validate the BV value of Ram semen and improve selection decisions on farm (i.e. which Rams give the greatest chance of producing low carbon daughters).

These effects will not be felt immediately but considering the current flock numbers around 27 million, any small change will be compound. More data is needed though. And the magnitude of these selective decisions in mitigating enteric methane production is still uncertain.

This index will also need to prove its value in the sector and only time will tell whether famers will actively choose low carbon Ewes without any economic incentive to do so.

It is likely that low carbon feeds and methane BV values will form part of New Zealand’s mitigation response. These technologies are still novel and will take time to properly establish on farm. However, it’s clear that New Zealand and institutions are leading the way in creating a low carbon future.

1. Roque, B.M., et al., Inclusion of Asparagopsis armata in lactating dairy cows’ diet reduces enteric methane emission by over 50 percent. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019. 234: p. 132-138.