Save as WWF – green file format

The year 2011 was declared the “International Year of Forests” by the UN. According to WWF Germany, we lose 13 million hectares of forest worldwide every year. This corresponds to about one and a half times the area of Austria. Today, almost every second industrially felled tree is processed into paper. According to a study, more than a third of all respondents in Germany print out e-mails as a matter of principle. Almost half take up to 50 pages out of the printer every day. Yet six per cent of all printouts at the workplace end up unread in the wastepaper basket. The consequences of this waste of resources are huge: not only do around 500,000 trees have to die for this. According to Eurostat, the superfluous printing corresponds to an energy quantity of ten billion kilowatt hours and burdens climate protection with more than 655,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

Time to act and set an example: in a pro bono project in 2010, together with Jung von Matt, we developed the WWF, the non-printable PDF: A new file format that saves trees.

Joint tasks included: Developing the International Claim: SAVE AS WWF – SAVE A TREE, developing the programme to create the WWF files, designing the desktop icon, approaching the Initial Partners, setting up the multilingual campaign website, saveaswwf.com, developing the viral campaign (Facebook, Youtube, blogs).

We made a lasting impression with the project: More than 400 reports in Germany, “leaf rustling” in the media worldwide, website visitors from 193 countries, 14,125 Facebook fans, more than 53,000 programme views and almost 200,000 video views.

In addition, we are pleased about the great praise from the industry in the form of numerous awards and nominations: Golden Lion Cannes, ADC Grand Prix, Golden Nail ADC, 3x Gold and 1x Bronze New York Festival, Finalist PR Report Award and International German PR Award.