For most businesses, being environmentally pro-active is a noble enterprise, but the day-to-day running of a company seems more important. We have deadlines and payroll to meet, customers to win and satisfy, and bills to be paid. And we must somehow realize a profit.
It too often seems that environmental and economic concerns are at odds, or at least incongruous, but such thinking is outdated at best and dangerous at worst. The environment vs. business model is based on a false paradigm, and if ever a paradigm shift was needed, this is it.
That the environment, health, and safety are again hot topics (global warming pun not intended) is a given, and these inter-related issues have a profound affect on our businesses, family, and community. As a minimum, we must comply with government regulations, but going beyond those regulations reveals even more opportunities to protect the earth that are also good for business.
If we understand and better control the environmental aspects of our businesses, we will improve our profitability. Environmental protection is, fundamentally, about reducing or eliminating waste. Call it pollution, call it “avoidable business costs”—either way you’re describing mismanaged or unnecessarily created waste.
There are many examples of how an active commitment to pollution prevention practices and waste management reduces operating costs, protects capital investment, and increases business efficiencies. Such thinking is essentially in line with management systems such as Lean Enterprises, the 5S system from Japan, and ISO standards. By using the above mentioned systems to do the right thing by the environment, you may even turn loss into profit.
Environmental costs add up quickly—for example, if you are a printer who pays $200 each week to have a drum of waste solvent picked up for disposal, that’s $10 400 a year. How much in sales do you have to generate to pay for that waste? If you install a solvent recycler you can recapture about 80% for reuse, which is certainly a significant savings. The typical cost for a drum of blanket wash is $600—by my math, and extracting 50% for the water content, that would be a combined $25 000 back on your bottom line, every year.
Because what I have just described is a reduction of waste “at source,” it is a true pollution prevention (P2) initiative. And I may not have mentioned that you would also eliminate about 5 tonnes of volatile organic compound emissions (VOC’s—a major cause of smog) from your government-reportable inventory.
I’ve just alluded to another false paradigm—“we are doing our best by treating or recycling our waste.” Truly, what is best for our businesses and for the environment is not to produce the waste in the first place, or at least to reduce it. This is the definition of Pollution Prevention: “eliminating or reducing waste at its source.”
It is nice to be able to say that “our company recycled 150 tonnes of paper, 2000 printing plates, or 10 drums of waste ink or 16 000 litres of spent blanket wash” but repurposing that waste costs a lot of money and we either get only a fraction of it back or have to pay to have it safely disposed of. Recycled waste does not go away, it just goes somewhere else.
Two of the best exponents of P2 initiatives are the Canadian Centre for Pollution Prevention (C2P2) and the Ontario Centre for Environmental Technology Advancement (OCETA)—and they also happen to work together.
I have learned a lot working with OCETA on behalf of our industry over the last five years. And they in turn have realized a very big interest in helping the imaging, printing, and packaging community because of the dramatic results they can achieve. They offer direct financial assistance through their funding program for P2 Assessments and planning under the umbrella of the Greater Toronto Region Sustainability Program. Now municipalities such as Durham, Peel, and York Region have picked up on the success of this program and offer it to local businesses.
The Program provides opportunities for collaborative efforts on pollution prevention (P2) and eco-efficiency. Companies, including printers, with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for funding of up to $4000 to have a P2 assessment conducted by a pre-qualified consultant who will assess and identify the root causes of priority pollutants and wastes and source out and recommend technology and operational improvements.
Implementing the P2 assessment recommendations leads to cost avoidance, reduced liability, preservation of capital asset value, improved environmental and operational performance, and demonstrated due diligence. The program is very flexible and includes priorities specific to each individual company.
Another major economic and environmental savings can be found in paper, our industry’s major raw material. And saving paper means saving trees and therefore forests. The world’s intact forests are disappearing at a rate of two acres per second, according to Global Forest Watch Canada, and 70 per cent of the world’s remaining intact forests are in Canada, Russia, and Brazil. Forests are also incubators of many different lifeforms, and the plants, bugs, and animals that rely on forests are also going extinct.
The above few facts are just part of the background behind the global Forest Stewardship Council and FSC certification. The FSC’s multimedia marketing is driving increasing demand for the use of FSC-certified paper by print purchasers. Only FSC-certified printers can use the FSC logos and trademarks on certified stock and claim their place as part of the Chain of Custody that tracks paper back to a certified forest.
It takes 24 trees and 20820 litres (5500 gallons) of water to make one metric tonne (2200lbs) of paper, and a further 2.55 cubic metres of landfill space to dispose of this paper. As paper breaks down in landfill, it produces methane gas, which is a 24 times worse than carbon dioxide for global warming.
An average printer will produce and recycle about 100 tonnes of waste paper per year, much of which ends up as newsprint and, as the fibres get shorter from recycling, brown kraft, and finally landfill. Rather than recycling paper, it makes better business and environmental sense to focus on reducing the waste at source by adopting P2 practices. I haven’t the space here to go into details about the myriad of opportunities for waste reduction and process improvements, but there are plenty of resources where you can learn more.
To quote Shoichiro Toyoda, President of Toyota: Waste is “anything other than the minimum amount of equipment, materials, paperwork, space and workers time which are absolutely essential to add value to the product.”
For more information on the OCETA program, contact Fred Granek, Vice President, Toronto Region Sustainability Program at 416.778.5324 or at fgranek@oceta.on.ca.
For more information on C2P2, FSC and other related organizations and initiatives please go to the EcoSafe web site at
www.ecosafe-environmental.net
John Piggott EMS(A)
EcoSafe environmental health & safety management
www.ecosafe-environmental.net
11 Bridgid Drive, Whitby, Ontario, L1M 1T7
T: 905.430.9049
F: 905.668.7974
E: ecosafe@rogers.com
