In reply to IainWhitehouse:
> (In reply to roblo)
> [...]
>
> Agreed (and it is something I have put to at least one manufacturer).
>
> Sadly they are prey to market forces and the consumers seem to demand anodising. I think the onus has to be on us to ask for non-anodised product and vote with the wallet.
14 years ago when I was involved with Wild Country, Mark Vallance (then CEO) chose not to anodise hardware because of the negative environmental effect of this process. Even at the time I thought it was bonkers that Wild Country didn't make a big song and dance about this in their marketing.
The fact is climbers wanted nice coloured krabs, so eventually they met this demand. And now we have colour-coordinated camming units and nuts. How else do you update products which have essentially remained the same for 20+ years?
So it's laudable that Wild Country are not printing brochures any more, but let's face it, if it made commercial sense to continue doing so, they would.
On the subject of brochures. In the package travel industry, the internet is now king, but we (Jagged Globe) continue to print brochures. However, we now print half what we did 5 years ago and only mail them to past customers and people who have enquired very recently. For the first time this year, we have printed them on re-cycled paper. Not to make a big environmental statement, but because the quality has improved and, due to demand, the price of re-cycled stock has come down.