How DS Beats Paper in the Race to be Green

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The EU has set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020, Germany wants to reduce their average total greenhouse gas emissions by 35% by 2012 (based on their 1990 levels) and the ‘Climate Change Bill’ has set a target for UK industry to achieve a saving of 60% in carbon consumption by 2050. Now a recently-released study has shown that digital signage could actually be doing its bit to help.
 
At DIGITAL SIGNAGE EXPO 2009, Hartmut Kulessa, Marketing Manager for Panasonic Professional Projector and Display Europe, presented the results of an extensive study into the carbon emissions of digital signage compared with those of traditional paper signage. This independent study into whether digital signage consumes less carbon than a traditional poster setup was commissioned by Media Zest, co-sponsored by Cisco and Panasonic, and carried out by leading consumer research company ROI Team and Brunel University.
 
Both systems were evaluated ‘from warehouse to warehouse,’ so that the carbon consumption taken into account was in their predicted active lives only, i.e. from the time the components left the warehouse to when the system was disassembled and taken out of active use. While other comparable studies like POPAI’s ‘Green Project’ have sought to evaluate performance from ‘cradle to grave’, this is a more laborious process and can lead to lower quality of data, so was not used in this case.

The scenario was that 150 high street stores adopted a digital signage solution for three years, replacing their traditional poster display solution. This change brought about a 29.74tCO2e carbon saving over the three years, which is equivalent to the energy consumption of a traditional household for more than five years. The carbon consumption from the projected digital signage display was found to be 7.5% lower than the traditional poster package.
 
Andy Hawkins, Sales and Marketing Director of MediaZest:“We believe it is both a business and moral imperative for all companies to analyse their practices and make any contribution possible towards the environment. We are obviously delighted by the results, as we took a risk in its commissioning before knowing what we would see. Our gut feeling has always been that our clients can not only enjoy the business, branding and aesthetic benefits of digital displays but that it was more environmentally friendly, and that seems to have been proven.”
 
The digital display analysed in this study comprised of a Panasonic PT-D4000 projector, with its dual lamp system, a two way facing 3M Vikuiti film applied to the window, a Cisco media player, plus stand and cabling as required. Events taken into account for digital signage were a three year lifespan for the technology, one trip for installation, two routine maintenance visits per year, and one trip for decommission. With the equipment, electricity usage and all this taken into account, the total carbon equivalent consumption for three years would be 348.83 tCO2e. This is an actual package offered in the marketplace by Media Zest.
This was compared with a traditional display consisting of a Katana AO Lightbox system, a fluorescent illuminated lightbox displayed on aluminium frame, with the copy taken to be changed by local staff twenty times a year, but with only one visit per year for maintenance. The lifespan was taken at three years to enable comparison with the digital signage set up. Twenty copy changes a year would entail producing four AO posters per site twenty times in each year, as well as twenty courier drops per site per year. With production and delivery of posters, fluorescent light tubes, and electricity usage, the carbon equivalent consumption for three years would be 376.82 tCO2e.
 
Sources of carbon consumption which were identified for digital signage included: distribution and installation (vehicle consumption and packaging), system performance (electricity to power system), system maintenance (vehicle consumption for repair and maintenance visits and energy consumption to test equipment) and the decommission phase (vehicle consumption). Traditional paper displays share some of these sources, but they incur further carbon costs through paper for posters, the printing and production process, distributing posters by courier, and energy produced by power tools.
 
For the digital signage system, 88% of all carbon consumption is from electricity usage. The projector accounts for more than 90% of this energy consumed. For the traditional poster system, 68% of all carbon consumption was from consumption of diesel by vans, with more than two thirds of this attributable to courier delivery of posters. Paper production accounts for 9% of carbon consumed. Over the three years, the poster package’s carbon consumption equates to 129 trees or three household’s energy use over three years.
 
One can deduce, then, that if half of all high street window displays converted to digital signage the carbon saving would be enormous and would have a big impact on the carbon emissions of high street operators. The digital distribution of content dramatically reduces carbon emissions from couriers transporting new posters around retail outlets.
 
 
As Dr Joyce Tsoi, the Research Fellow involved at Brunel University, commented, “These results show a strong positive result for the use of digital media.” She went on to explain that as surprisingly little sustainability research exists that can inform business opinion about carbon performance, this is a significant step forward in encouraging environmental debate in the point-of-sale advertising business. There has traditionally been a distinct lack of performance benchmarks for this sector.
 
Panasonic said that it does not see this study as an invitation to relax its efforts towards more environmentallyfriendly digital signage, but merely the continuation of its dedication to enabling the greener use of technology. Panasonic’s latest range of projectors, the PT-D6000 1 chip DLP projector, achieves a standby power consumption of under 0.5 watts, and the company is continuing to work on developing more efficient projector technology.
 
As Hartmut Kulessa concluded, “As a global technology provider, we take our responsibilities very seriously and are confident that we will continue to produce more and more environmentally-conscious products for use in the digital signage arena.”