For years now, we’ve been telling you that you need to be a “green” printer. Well, now I’m going to tell you to be a sustainable printer instead.
First, let’s look at what those terms mean. Green and sustainable have much the same meaning to most people, however, they are two different things.
Originally, the term green was used to imply that products and services are produced with minimal harm to – or exploitation of – the natural environment. We believe green products reduce the impact on the environment because they are made from renewable or biological sources and don’t pollute the air and water. It’s logical to equate green with the environment; after all, we would all like to save trees.
Sustainable products and services extend beyond the environment to include consideration of people and society, and add an element of economic viability. If a business is not economically viable, it’s not a business, plain and simple.
While green has become “shorthand” to imply sustainable products and ethical sourcing, overall it most often focuses on environmental responsibility.
What makes a sustainable printer?
A business is:
Socially Responsible
– Honest in all activities and supportive of communities
– Respects the welfare and safety workers throughout the supply chain
– Contributes back to the community with living pay scales for employees
Environmentally considerate
– Benefits the natural order as much as possible
– Respects eco-system limits in production, processing and distribution
– Avoids ecologically destructive practices, such as water pollution, overharvesting, soil destruction and erosion
Economically prudent
– Accounts for natural capital throughout the production and supply chain
– Generates a reasonable profit to support the long-term viability of the business
– Creates real economic benefit to society
Becoming a Sustainable Printer
There are solid steps that you can take which will result in defining, developing and delivering truly sustainable products and services.
First, look inside your company and assess your corporate mission and values. Are you committed and actively working to reduce your environmental impacts and improving your social responsibility? If not, any efforts you make to describe your products and services as “sustainable” will simply be whitewashing, greenwashing, or whatever colour you want to call it. Your customer and their customers are leery of anything that looks like touting and flaunting.
Examine and understand your products’ lifecycles. Where can you make the biggest environmental or social impact? Sometimes the biggest dollar spent does not give you the best impact, so look closely.
Add or improve the availability of environmentally-friendly products. And – from the other side – eliminate any that are not. Now is the time to look at ways to improve your products. For some products, the biggest reduction in environmental impact can come in the ways your customers use them. Design products for recyclability and reuse.
Examine your procurement, production and packaging to understand their environmental and social impacts. Reach up and down the supply chain to understand how your suppliers and your suppliers’ suppliers affect the environment and society.
Measuring Sustainability
There are dozens of ways to measure business effects on society, the environment, and the economy. Economic measures are the simplest because profitability is the driver, again – no profit, no business – at least over the long haul. Companies use all kinds of measurements from cash flow to various profit categories (i.e., gross, net, before taxes, after taxes, etc.) to ensure economic viability.
Environmental effects are somewhat more difficult to measure. Printers often look at sustainably sourced paper, bio-based inks and waste recycling as the narrow prism through which sustainability is measured. Expanding to product lifecycle analysis; measurement of water and energy usage and waste; or tracking of greenhouse gas emissions are all part of the next level of sophistication.
Measuring the effect of business on society has, until now, been a small part of the equation; you need to go beyond health and safety requirements. Look at the personal and professional development of your staff. Look at wages and working conditions. Look also at the effect that your products and services have on your employees, your community and the environment.
Whether you use a formal documentation and management system like ISO 9000 (quality management systems), ISO 14001 (environmental management systems) and/or ISO 14020 (environmental labels and declarations), you really need to move beyond compliance.
Certification and Verification
Eco-labels – those labels and symbols that indicate certification, endorsement or approval of a product or process – are a form of “transparency by proxy.” Your customers are depending on third parties to ensure that someone knows that the products have been harvested, processed and delivered in ways that match certain performance criteria or standards.
They may be symbols or claim statements or a label awarded by a third-party organization that has audited, inspected, or in some other way examined a product or process to determine if all standards and criteria have been met.
If you choose to be certified for your product, process or operation, search for third-party verification such as those from Green Star, Forest Stewardship Council, Sustainable Green Printing Partnership, or other certifications and registrations.
While small companies may find the cost of certain certifications to be high, it is not necessary to “collect merit badges” to be recognized as a responsible company. Certifications are the main way that printers have expressed their sustainable practices to their customers, however, they are not the only way. Whether you complete a formal certification or not, consider looking at the qualification process for a variety of programs and implement as many of the actions as possible.
The most comprehensive certification programs look at more than a process or a product; they examine the entire business and its effects. Companies that are seeking to position themselves as socially and environmentally responsible must look beyond business as usual or simple “green stamps” designed to impress customers without requiring any systematic change.
It’s a case of taking action – the right action – and being transparent about the results of those actions.
Look at your options; set “stretch goals” to achieve change and improvements reflected by the most respected certification programs. Be honest and straightforward, and listen to your customers. They will tell you what it is they need from you.
For an extremely broad certification that measures companies for the benefits they provide society, the environment and their employees and customers as well as their investors, consider a “Benefit Corporation” or B Corporation certification.
B Corporations (B-Corps) must meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards and institutionalize stakeholder interests. Companies are not only measured on how they do business, but what kind of effects their products and services have on employees, customers and the environment.
The certification/audit process looks at the building, business processes, operational activities, product lifecycle and employee, community and customer relationships.
For more information, go to http://www.bcorporation.net/
Certification as a B Corporation is open to businesses of all kinds, and there are a number of printing and print-related companies that are certified B-Corps. The following are two examples of the kinds of metrics reported by printers.
SEEDS Green Printing (Pittsburgh, San Diego and San Francisco) is a B-Corp and for certification, the company reported:
- About 75 percent of office supplies come from recycled materials
- More than 50 percent of their carbon inventory is offset
- More than 25 percent of their energy use comes from renewable sources and the percentage of renewable energy use increases annually
- 100 percent of their employees are reimbursed for continuing education
- All their facilities are handicapped accessible
- More than half of the company ownership resides in the same community as two-thirds of the workforce
- About 40 percent of expenditures are directed toward local suppliers
- About 15 percent of suppliers are from low-income communities
- Around 10 percent of net profits are given to charitable organizations
- Around 40 percent of employees are women.
For more information about SEED Green Printing, visit: http://www.seedsgreenprinting.com
TS Designs, a custom T-shirt printer located in Burlington, North Carolina, is also a B-Corp. For certification, the company reported:
- One hundred percent sustainable fibres in the t-shirts they print
- One hundred percent of the company fleet uses alternative fuel
- Packaging consists of 100 percent post-consumer recycled material
- An on-site garden provides access to organic produce for all employees
- Around 15 percent of profits are shared with employees.
- The company pays about 50 percent of employee health insurance premiums
- Around 20 percent of expenditures directed towards independent local suppliers
- About five percent of profits are donated to charitable organizations.
For more information about TS Designs, visit: http://www.tsdesigns.com
The Sustainable Green Printing Partnership (SGPP) provides a comprehensive industry-specific certification – Sustainable Green Printer (SGP) – that was established to “encourage and promote participation in the worldwide movement to reduce environmental impact and increase social responsibility of the print and graphic communications industry through sustainable green printing practices.”
According to the SGPP, the guiding principals for sustainable business are to
- employ, wherever and whenever possible, materials derived from renewable resources or with low environmental impact, maximizing recycling and recovery efforts with efficient utilization of renewable energy
- encourage the adoption of changes within the supply chain by strongly recommending the use of raw materials that do not threaten or harm future generations
- educate the customer and ultimate consumer regarding the benefits of a restorative economy.
The SGP certification measures continuous improvement across the plant, the operational processes and the product(s) produced. The criteria, which is undergoing an update, include a small subsection addressing social and human resource issues, however the program does not currently look beyond compliance with government employment laws to wider benefits to society.
Currently 26 companies have completed SGP certification and 21 more are in the process. For more information, visit https://www.sgppartnership.org/
There are a wide variety of other certification or recognition programs that you may consider. At the very least, the qualifications for any of the following are informational, educational and potentially inspiring.
Design/Printing
Canopy: http://www.canopyplanet.org/
Renourish: http://www.re-nourish.com/
Designers Accord: http://www.designersaccord.org/
Institute for Sustainable Communication: http://www.sustainablecommunication.org/
Bio-derived Renewable Content Certification (for printing inks): http://napim.org/
Business
The Living Principles: http://www.livingprinciples.org/
Environment
Rainforest Alliance: http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/
EPA Climate Leaders: http://www.epa.gov/climateleaders/
Building/Facility:
LEED, US Green Building Council: http://www.usgbc.org/
Guiding Principles of Sustainable Design: http://165.83.19.8/d_publications/d_1_gpsd.htm
Marketing Sustainability
Let’s assume you’ve made the commitment to be a sustainable printer. You’ve examined your processes and products, you’re sourcing sustainably, you’ve either chosen to certify your products and processes or developed your own program informed by existing validation systems, and you’re measuring and prepared to report on your progress.
Before you begin communicating your sustainability message to your stakeholders (customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers and your community), consider carefully the following questions.
- Do your initiatives or programs address an issue related to your core business?
- Is it of interest to your stakeholders?
- Is your initiative a significant environmental or social achievement?
- Is your initiative in conflict with any other activities in your company?
- Are you documenting, measuring and validating your impact?
- Have you considered resources (time and/or money) in the initiative?
- Do you anticipate spending more money on the activity, initiative or program than on your communications about it?
If you can’t answer, “yes” to these questions, stop now and go back to the beginning of this article.
As you begin your marketing program, apply the same good marketing principles to communicating your sustainability initiatives as you do for your other promotional activities.
Work across multiple functions in your company; an initiative that has significant impact takes cooperation. Use a wide range of communications channels to reach all of your stakeholders, from those who are most environmentally and socially conscious to those who are less committed.
Take full advantage of new technologies and new channels to give your stakeholders sustainability information, ranging from social media and to QR (quick response) codes to mobile applications.
Once you’re “walking the talk” and have implemented social and environmental initiatives that truly have impact, use all the most sophisticated marketing tools and methods at your disposal to communicate your efforts – and your successes – honestly and effectively.
Prove It!
Consumers – your customers’ customers – are becoming increasingly concerned about the environmental performance of products. They are looking for proof. For example, they want to know about the resources and energy used to produce products and about the sustainability of the product design (can it be reused or recycled? Is it biodegradable? Is it made of recycled materials?). They want to know if your products are sustainably sourced. Your customers want to know that, by using your products, they can manage the impact they have on the environment.
More and more businesses are communicating environmental benefits through a wide range of advertising and labelling tools such as logos, certifications, endorsements, approvals and statements to position and differentiate products and services and to be more competitive.
Those claims, according to Competition Bureau Canada, can be implemented to demonstrate environmental leadership, relative performance, or just provide information. They may be self-managed or third-party-managed; verified in-house or independently verified and/or certified; based on the product life cycle or a single attribute; available for single or multiple sectors and/or product categories.
The real value of these claims is based on the belief by your customers that the information provided is “credible, objective and easily identifiable and understood.”
To ensure that you’re providing your customers the information they need and want, you first need to identify and carefully examine all the environmental claims you make regarding your products. Then review the requirements in Environmental Claims: A Guide for Industry and Advertisers, available from Competition Bureau Canada (http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/02701.html).
While you need to stay within the guidelines provided, you should look for new and different ways to inform and educate your customers. Your proofs do not have to be dry “legalese.” They can tell the story behind your product.
Advice From the Trenches
Every year, printers who are implementing a wide variety of sustainability initiatives and practices are recognized across North America. Recognition may come from local sustainability groups, city or provincial governments, or even national or international organizations. Learn from them and build your own programs.
Widely recognized for its sustainability efforts, Hemlock Printers has been named the Most Environmentally Progressive Printer in Canada every year since 2006. Dick Kouwenhoven, president and CEO, shares some of his insights on ways to develop and implement initiatives and environmentally-sensitive practices.
Q&A with Hemlock Printers
Gail: How can a company make a business case for sustainability initiatives? How did you go about it?
Hemlock Printers: We’ve discovered that initiatives driven by a desire to be green often have a positive financial impact. There are many instances where we’ve discovered that what’s good for the environment also saves money.
There are really two parts to a business case. First is the cost side. By concentrating on “lean manufacturing,” you can measure results through waste reduction and process improvement. For example, by changing some of our processes, we’ve cut our waste pickup from daily to twice weekly and that saves us $10,000 to $15,000 a year.
The biggest improvement recently has been our filtration system. As a company, we had to deal with a variety of waste chemicals, water usage and discharge issues; those have been eliminated. We invested $70,000 on the system and the labour savings alone gave us a one-year payback.
You discover these things as you go along. If you try to build a business case to save money, you might never attempt projects like these.
The other part of the business case is the revenue side. It’s harder to measure, but initiatives like Zero, our Carbon Neutral Printing Program and our FSC endorsement are all stories the sales reps can use to differentiate us as a company. How many companies respond because we are a green company? That’s hard to document.
It’s a combination of elements – quality, pricing and environmental sensitivity – that all come together. We are seeing more requests for proposal (RFPs) that have environmental specifications where we are measured against other companies. We know we’ve been awarded contracts in part because of our environmental initiatives.
We’ve learned from, networked with and shared practices with other companies in our community to broaden the effect of these programs. We readily share what has worked for us and where we have found the biggest impacts.
Gail: How do you measure the results of your initiatives?
Hemlock Printers: Hemlock is a small company, but we measure as much as we can. We measure our waste reduction and our carbon footprint, and track the kind of paper we buy.
It’s a concentrated effort, we write down what we’ve accomplished, put some metrics behind it, and then report the results.
With our carbon neutral program we need to collect as much information as we can, especially for paper purchases. We have a reporting system to know how many jobs we’ve done in order to know how many offsets we have to purchase. To do that requires that our suppliers give us precise statistics for all the paper purchased.
We measure what we can without getting obsessive; it’s part of our everyday process so we don’t have to search for the data when we want to report our results. It’s already there.
Gail: How have you embedded your goals into your incentive and reporting structure, into your corporate DNA?
Hemlock Printers: We don’t actually incent our managers to be environmentally sensitive; it’s just part of the way we do business.
It is important that our environmental values be incorporated as a high level goal within our mission statement. We have an environmental policy, but it hasn’t been embedded in the mission statement yet. It’s in practice, but it hasn’t really been articulated to all stakeholders.
There is always more we can do. We focused on external initiatives as we launched the carbon neutral program. Now we want to bring it back to an internal focus and communicate more with our staff, like we did in the beginning. It’s an on-going thing.
Gail : How do you work with designers to help them design for the environment, to make their products more recyclable or reusable?
Hemlock Printers: The question of recyclability comes up regularly. We try to steer specifications to materials that can be recycled. Most fibre-based materials can be accepted in to the regular recycling streams.
For example, we’ve encouraged our lamination supplier to stock a biodegradable lamination. Many printed products require some kind of laminated coating to give them strength and protect the image; unfortunately most laminates are not recyclable.
Working together we can offer a cellulose-based product that is only slightly more expensive than traditional plastic. Developed for window envelopes, the film has been turned into a laminating film.
We also regularly have creative professionals in Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC) and students in local design programs come and tour the operation. As part of those tours we give presentations about green printing concepts and designing with the environment in mind.
Gail: Is sustainability a marketing strategy or is it the message that underlies your marketing strategy?
Hemlock Printers: Hemlock is regarded as one of the best printers in North America; we are really an exceptionally good printer that happens to have sustainability in our DNA. We certainly don’t say, “We’re really green and we deliver approximately what you want.” We definitely communicate our environmental achievements, but it isn’t our strategy to say we are green first. We keep our focus on our quality and core products.
People don’t buy a product just because it’s sustainable. When the choice is between two similar products, they will select the one that happens to be better. The criteria are quality and price, but also environmental sensitivity. It’s not first, or instead of quality and price.
In print services, you buy quality and price first. If we focus too much on the environmental aspect, we are almost encouraging a response that has a very short life.
To learn more about Hemlock Printers sustainability initiatives and programs, go to http://www.hemlock.com/.
Don’t be Green!
Getting on the path to sustainability is not difficult; there is an enormous amount of information available from trade associations, industry publications, vendors and suppliers, to the Internet. Educate yourself, your staff and your customers.
Sustainable practices are likely to become the “ticket to do business” as more printers develop and implement sustainability initiatives and as legislation and market demands add pressure.
Look for grant money, tax savings and other opportunities to fund your programs. Be proactive and research local, provincial and national opportunities.
Think big, but start small. It is not necessary to tackle all the big issues at one time; often a number of small initiatives can add up to big dollars.
And it isn’t necessary to reinvent the wheel. There are lots of companies with lots of stories to tell – about successes and failures. Copy their best practices and adjust them to your operation.
Remember that marketing and public relations are an important part of your strategy. Tell the world what you are doing, educate your customers, inform your community. The entire concept of sustainable print is surrounded by myth and misinformation. You have the opportunity to provide education and add value to your customer relationships.
