Environmental killer inserts? The truth looks different

In view of the digital alternatives, advertising brochures are no longer up to date - and even worse, they are climate killers. This is precisely what is often cited by those who have just discontinued their printed offer communication or are planning to do so. Neither the one nor the other is true, as Dr Ralph Dittmann, Managing Director of the WKS Group, impressively demonstrated at the Online Print Symposium 2023 with the help of current figures. 

The WKS Group, which unites ten successful print and media companies such as Westend, Kraft-Schlötels, Haberbeck and Häuser Druck under one roof and also offers service and fulfilment, is a real heavyweight in the German print market with a total of more than 1,000 employees and a total turnover of 400 million euros. The group's focus is on a product that was the subject of much discussion last year: the insert, produced in rotary offset. 

WKS had already begun to expand in precisely this area in 2006 and has grown constantly since then. "We are now at 12 billion 16-pages - to translate that: We print 6,100 A4 pages every second, on average, all year round," explained Dr Ralph Dittmann at OPS 2023. "It's almost 400,000 tonnes of paper that we print on our presses. This means that we are now the fourth-largest commercial web printer in Europe and the biggest insert printer in Europe. 

The biggest challenge for insert printers at present, as Dittmann openly explained in Munich, is above all the increased price of paper, which has recently caused the cost of brochures to double in some cases. "It's not the customer demand, it's the paper prices," said Dittmann. 

Insert volume grew steadily 

Speaking of customer demand: "What hardly anyone knows," Dittmann explained, "until Covid the supplement grew like mad". So much so, in fact, that since 2009, despite shrinking gravure and "rest" offset capacities, the commercial volume remained largely stable at around 5.5 million tons until 4 years ago. After the paper and Covid crises, according to the expert, the commercial volume in 2022 was still at 3.9 million tonnes, of which, at 1.9 million tons, by far the largest share was nevertheless accounted for by inserts in offset. 

Read more about how (among other things) figures disprove the myth of the "evil" print product.