Who is the bigger employer in the United States, the printing or the automotive industry? If you guessed printing, take a bow—an $83+ billion bow. Yes, believe it or not, in the US, 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. 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 we've never 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.
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