Rob van den Braak

These fires are an annual event and a natural part of Indonesia’s climate and ecosystem, but destruction of forests and peatlands has exacerbated their negative impact on local air quality and the global climate. The forest clearance has sadly been going on for years. The Indonesian government and local vested interests such as APP do lip service to halting it and to restoration projects, but not much seems to change. This year, the burning peatlands drained as part of the forest clearance for logging and palm oil plantations, are responsible for the hospitalisation of some 500,000 people across South East Asia.

Indonesia accelerated its logging and land clearance about 30 years ago in a quest for development, that turned out to be very profitable for pulp and paper companies such as APP. But it was not so good for indigenous people, wildlife or global warming. Rainforests have been described as the lungs of the planet, so for many years now organisations such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace have been pressuring Indonesia to get its act together and stop the destruction. In 2010 the government of Norway even pledged $1 billion to Indonesia to help it save its trees. But hardly any of the money has been handed over, because Indonesia hasn’t responded with tangible policies to restore its destroyed forest lands.

Indonesia has recently made some more encouraging noises. Vice president Jusuf Kalla said that the country would aim for two to three million hectares of peatland restoration by 2020 in an effort to reduce the fires. But there is still no state agency responsible for putting such a plan into effect.

The graphics industry and its customers have responded in the past by boycotting paper sourced from Indonesian forests. Things lightened up over the last couple of years, but promises remain unfulfilled. Until the government puts into place tangible plans to recover the lost peatlands and forests, printers, publishers and their supply chains should keep their backs turned.

Based on an analysis of a paper’s stretch characteristics, this software works out what needs to be done to the imaging data to take the paper’s tendencies into account. This means that the imaged plates are accurate first time around and there is no need to remake plates once the effects of the paper’s stretch are apparent on press. Not only does this save the hassle of having to make a new set of plates, it also saves the associated energy and consumables.

A common way to deal with this problem is to make mechanical adjustments of the plates on press. But this is a solution that only works through trial and error, so it can be costly and time consuming. Another approach is to manually adjust the data once it is clear what needs to be done to fix it. This too is expensive and slow. In both cases the press waits idle while the compensation for paper stretch is done and new plates made.

Heidelberg’s solution is a software module that compensates for stretch. The module is ready now and will be available as an integrated module within Prinect next year. Heidelberg are still mulling over how to charge for this software. It makes no sense to charge a high price for companies who will only need to use it from time to time, say for papers they use only occasionally. However the software has a much higher value if it gets used on a regular basis and yields massive savings.

Ten, even five years ago the effort involved to modify page image data before plate imaging would not have seemed worthwhile. It was easier to ignore the waste and emissions associated with inaccurate data processing. But today such a cavalier attitude simply won’t do, if a printer wants to stay in the game. Even little things must be considered and acted on if they can make a difference to productivity and efficiency.

Throughout industry, companies are using software to improve the capacity and performance of manufacturing systems. Printing and publishing are not immune to this trend, however it will take vision and imagination to work out how to exploit software to create new and profitable business models. The newspaper industry is already struggling with this quite visibly, but we expect the creative need to infect all areas of the graphics industry. The good news is that waste rates for materials and energy are coming down all the time.

Laurel Brunner