Business Management - Sustainability

Now that you’re on the path to becoming a truly sustainable printer, here are a few thoughts about how to reach that goal and some metrics that may help you tell when you’ve arrived. Environmental Leader publishes a quarterly “Environmental & Energy Data Book” full of charts and graphs presenting environmental, sustainability and energy-related data.

Green initiatives are prevalent throughout most industries these days, including publishing. But how sustainable are our publishing practices? Dennis Stovall, director of the publishing program at Portland State University and publisher at Ooligan Press, tackles this topic in the following interview. Stovall will also expand on his ideas at the upcoming miniTOC Portland.

How do you define “sustainable publishing?”

Dennis Stovall: The two most important sustainability concerns are environmental and cultural. The former, which students at Ooligan Press address so well in “Rethinking Paper & Ink,” gets most of our attention, and it fits with all of the issues of environmental care

Successful companies are good at generating profitable ideas, yet they often overlook business opportunities that can be found within fundamental societal issues. It is in the root causes of those issues that new competitive advantages may be found.

A life cycle assessment (LCA) of digital vs. paper would consider the environmental impacts, including energy use and CO₂ emissions, of harvesting trees, manufacturing and transporting paper, printing and recycling or disposal, compared to the environmental costs of manufacturing, shipping, marketing, using and disposing of your digital reader.

Sierra Magazine, The New York Times and TerraPass have recently looked into this issue with regard to books. Their conclusion is that if you read a lot of books a digital reader is greener than paper, but if you read few books, paper wins. One study put the number of books at 40

Monroe Litho earned the Pollution Prevention Achievement Award for its environmental initiatives with High Tech Rochester. The collaboration helped reduce process waste by 100 percent and water usage by 5.9 percent, decrease emissions by 29 percent and cut fuel used in the transportation of paper by 31 percent.

As print service providers, knowing the issues your customers face will help you better solve their problems. Your customers’ customers—consumers—look differently at environmentally friendly products depending where they fall on the green continuum. Until green products and services feel normal, the middle is unlikely to change behavior.

School may be out for our kids, but it’s never out for business owners and managers. Here is a short reading list to help you along the path to sustainability. Summer reading, anyone?

The authors of a new report just released by the Rochester Institute of Technology have concluded that there’s a lot of activity going on in the printing industry regarding sustainable practices. That’s good news. The bad news? There’s a lot more that needs to be done.

When it participated in the Carbon Disclosure Project, Standard Register scored 91 out of 100 possible points, among the top 5 percent of 1,100 companies participating in the study. The average score for participating companies was 48.

The bad news is that conventional marketing is out. The good news is, green marketing—or “sustainable branding,” if you prefer—is in. Green marketing is an over-arching strategy that extends to all corporate functions, rather than a series of tactics.