PrintReleaf Helps Printers See the Trees for the Forest

A new face on the PRINT 17 show floor is PrintReleaf (Booth 567), a company that offers a new approach to environmental sustainability. PrintReleaf is introducing a subscription-based software platform for the industry that measures paper consumption, equates it to forest impact, and makes that data actionable, applying it to reforestation efforts underway around the world.

Here’s how it works in the office printing space. A large company, like a bank, often has diagnostic software on its network that monitors all the connected devices, and sends data back to the vendor. The vendor then uses this information to proactively manage that customer for toner replenishment, service calls, and billing. PrintReleaf integrates with that monitoring software. “Paper consumption data is plugged into our platform,” says Jordan Darrah, President of PrintReleaf. “If they subscribe, we’re monitoring their paper consumption, and it becomes an automatic subscription to reforestation.”

The commercial print segments are more transactional than companies in the office space, in that print buyers pay for individual print jobs, so the software integration process requires a different approach. PrintReleaf is about to announce a partnership with a software company that makes estimating software for MIS systems.

The entire end-to-end system, from certifying reforestation partners and forests, measuring consumption, and ultimately delivering planted trees into the ground, is governed and overseen by a third-party certifying body called SGS International.

PrintReleaf’s platform isn’t intended to compete with current forest product certification programs. “Those standards are more about knowing where your paper comes from, while PrintReleaf is really the other side of that, where it’s going back to in the environment,” says Darragh.