Business Management - Sustainability

The trends expressed by your customers—and the customers of your customers—will influence the products you sell and produce. Researchers from Amazon have mapped a number of green product segments and labeled zones on a map of the United States as “hot” or “cold” depending on deviation from national averages.

ForestEthics has described the Sustainable Forestry Initiative label as “greenwashing,” and said the certification’s requirements permit practices that are harmful to the environment. In response, the “Conservation Chamber” of the SFI Board has distributed an open letter refuting ForestEthics’ assertions.

The main objective of the survey was to establish a baseline for the current state of adoption and implementation of sustainability practices within the printing industry. An unexpectedly large percentage of respondents (27 percent) did not have a sustainability policy.

To help printers “learn from their peers,” Canopy launched a Printer Leadership List to help them identify ways to implement paper purchasing policies that will benefit their businesses, communities and the world’s forests, while reducing the impacts of climate change.

Executives from the Digital Print Deinking Alliance and International Association of the Deinking Industry have signed a Letter of Intent for collaboration to investigate the deinking of inkjet prints. The primary objective of this collaboration is to identify new solutions suitable for combined recovered paper streams with analogue and digital prints.

“Talking green” with your customers means understanding their businesses and their needs. Your sustainability strategies should not be focused on just your company; you should be looking for prospects that will resonate with your values and principles.

Today, many printers have some type of chain-of-custody certification. Some, because they think it is the right thing to do and some, because their customers require it. The current movement seems to have some legs. More people across more generations are concerned about the environment. The printing industry is not always viewed as environmentally friendly. People in the industry are trying to change this perception, not because they are burying their heads in the sand and ignoring the march of electronic media into our lives, but because some of the information is just plain false.

Public opinion polls show that concern about the environment rises and falls based on the state of the economy and other factors, but concern about the negative impacts associated with using paper and printing continues to rise. Nothing captures the essence of these feelings more vividly than the signature line appearing at the foot of more and more e-mails: “Please consider the environment before printing this email.”

What’s implied is that digital media is the environmentally preferable choice and that print media is the environmentally destructive choice. But is it possible that digital media could be more destructive

Print products account for approximately 1 percent of the climate impacts of consumption by households, according to the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The carbon footprint of a book is equivalent to a car trip of approximately 4.35 miles.

We are bombarded with slogans like “Go paperless - Go Green,” “Paper kills trees” and other negative and misleading messages regarding paper and print. At a recent NHL hockey game I attended with my son, I even saw an ad (on the big screen) claiming that the use of recycled content tissue paper is saving forests and “nature.” It essentially told 20,000 people that “using wood to make paper is bad!”

When made responsibly, it’s difficult to find a more sustainable product than paper:

• It is the most recycled product in the world.