If you're involved in print in any way, you can't have been able to avoid the buzz around EcoPrint. Manufacturers are hanging their hats on proving why their equipment can be part of a sustainable workflow, and a plethora of major brands has signed up to impart wisdom on how they are meeting their environmental objectives. PSPs on Output's radar have communicated, too, how they are excited by an education-led show where the onus is not on them to sign hasty deals on large capital engines but, instead, to further their knowledge and spy out new opportunities whiout becoming more environmentally friendly.

EcoPrint's nebulous concept – a trade show but not a trade show – has taken some explaining and interpretation. The interactive schedule promises to be informative, using panels and seminars to further the ecological objects both of printers and the industry as a whole. The major brands exhibiting have had to submit, and have approved by an independent panel, a dossier explaining their green concepts, ensuring that nobody is hijacking the show only to emit a stream of purposeless greenwash.

Yet the event's ambition is much more than that. Directors Marcus Timson and Frazer Chesterman decided, for example, to make it adhere to a new environmental standard for the exhibitions industry, ISO 12001. The industry poster-boys – who made their names with wide-format show FESPA – have undergone the radical and sometimes frightening change associated with being an entrepreneur, a certain amount of fruitless sour grapes regarding their concept, and have gorged themselves on every piece of print-relevant sustainable information out there in their journey to EcoPrint. For the representation of that knowledge alone, it is worth a visit.

What they want to do, though, is to build not only a new type of event, but also a permanent home for the revolution that print needs desperately. EcoPrint could be successful as an eco-focused trade event alone, but Timson and Chesterman have realised the urgency for a radical change in both the mechanical procedure of printing, and the perception of print as an industry.

These ambitions can only be achieved if a number of 'elephant in the room' questions are addressed. I don't believe they have to be answered, but they must be debated properly, with all opinions heard out and weighed up. Print has a chance to change the outside world's impression – but without an objective, constructive exploration of the challenges, it simply won't make it.

For me, these elephantine issues and questions include, but are not limited to, the following.

1. As an industry, we need to have a full discussion about the responsibility for the end-of-life of printed applications. Who is responsible for their disposal or recycling? Is it the printer, their customer or someone else? How much printed matter could be kept out of landfill?

This leads to a greater, global point: how, at the local, national and international level, do we create a comprehensive end-of-life strategy for printed matter – and, indeed, for digital media? Small sign and display businesses complain frequently that their local councils do nothing to help them and their customers dispose of banner waste. Our towns, countries and planet need a comprehensive recycling scheme for paper, vinyl and other printed matter; at present there are only disparate, unsupported initiatives. What legislation is required to enforce a more ecological future, for our industry and for others?

This is key to a number of other discussions but is currently shirked as somebody else's job to do. EcoPrint could provide the first neutral forum in which to drive this conversation. With the big-name manufacturers, high-profile brands and agencies and the heavy contract-winning printers likely to be in attendance over the next two days, the early outlines of a working document – or a manifesto, if you like – could easily be assembled.