Resellers

The Print Industry – You can be part of it!

Did you know that in the United States, the printing industry is over an $84+ billon industry? Bigger than many major industries combined - even the automotive industry!  Printing isn't just big business, it's the biggest. Printers employ nearly 1 million people across the country, placing the meager 780,000 in the auto industry a distant second.

Sounds pretty outrageous until you stop to think about it. In a society that's constantly in search of access to information and literally obsessed with record-keeping, it stands to reason that printing is ubiquitous. And, the more digital we go, the more paper we are producing!  From new car manuals to tabloid newspapers to t-shirts to those little tags on mattresses, nearly every product calls on the printing industry somewhere along the line. Put in that light, the numbers don't seem quite so farfetched. So the big question is, if it's such a big industry, how come its not noticed?

The relative invisibility of the industry is due primarily to the nature of the business and the way it has evolved. To understand how the industry works and how to effectively target printing facilities for pollution prevention programs, we need to understand who they are, what they do, and perhaps most importantly, where is everybody?

According to the 6th Annual Report to Congress by the Printing Industry of America (PIA), printers are defined as: "Those firms engaged primarily in commercial printing, business forms, book printing, prepress services, quick printing and blank books and binders." This definition does not include firms mainly involved in publishing.

So, wouldn’t you want to be part of this???

The US domestic printing industry is an entity unlike almost any other. It's the largest employer-one of the largest in terms of economic output-and, if you were to judge by the response of the average person on the street, the printing industry maintains a profile so low that it just about disappears from sight. Instead of a rampaging giant of economic clout, it's a diverse, dispersed swarm of small businesses. The average printing facility is small (<20 employees), probably runs a lithographic or screen press, and has a better than average chance of finding itself in one of ten particular states.

The US printing industry is nothing else, if not proof of strength in numbers. They don't take up lots of real estate. They aren't generally the major employers in a given area.. Comprised of thousands of small, independent units, the printing industry employs nearly 1 million in some 60,000-100,000 plants and accounts for somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion dollars in business every single year. The print industry is too big to be ignored on all fronts, economic, social and environmental and the printing industry is projected to grow by 3.8-5.3 percent annually during this decade

Wow – and now with Smart Print, you can “easily” tap into this market!