Business Management - Sustainability

President/CEO of The John Roberts Co. and an accomplished industry veteran, Michael Keene has lead the company with an innovative vision and commitment to environmental protection. He’s here to share the company’s unique story and offer insight on its sustainable operations.

Paper recycling lacks the sexiness of a new press. Ever get jealous about the size of your competitor's baler? Didn't think so. Sure, it is a necessary evil, but if your shop prides itself on quality and attention to detail, then you can't short-arm your paper 
handling system requirements.

The $2.7 million project will allow Hagadone to contribute excess energy produced back to the Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO) grid, and is expected to pay for itself in about six years, saving Hagadone more than $160,000 in electricity costs in the first year alone.

The 1,408-panel array spreads across 25,000 square feet of existing roof space at Hagadone’s building on 274 Puuhale Road in Honolulu to power a quarter of the energy used by its administrative and printing operations.

Hagadone also underwent a state-of-the art energy retrofit of its building that included switching to a new type of frictionless chiller

The “National Geographic: Practice What You Print” campaign will have its official kickoff Oct. 12, and people will be encouraged to show their support of National Geographic switching to partially recycled paper. “It’s hypocritical for National Geographic to not use recycled paper,” said Paige Milch, 19, an elementary education sophomore at UF (University of Florida, Gainesville).

“National Geographic has inspired such environmentalism, yet they are not printing on recycled paper.”

Milch organized the National Geographic campaign for the UF campus through her internship with Student Public Interest Research Group. The campaign will also take place on campuses across the nation.

Google launched its Google Catalogs app this week with a shiny coat of greenwash. “A Greener Way to Shop” proclaims the new product’s promotional page, providing no substantiation for the claim. “With Google Catalogs, you can subscribe to paperless versions of all your favorite catalogs,” the page states.

Oh, so switching to information that's stored in energy-sucking data centers and then transmitted over the coal-fired Internet to devices containing a variety of toxic materials is environmentally sustainable simply because it involves no paper—a recyclable product made mostly from renewable materials? C’mon, Google, a sophisticated company that has put so much effort

Paper recyclers have long dealt with this hodgepodge of paper types. But in recent years, they have faced a new challenge: ink from digital printing presses. Changes in the way some paper is printed have mills concerned that they could be forced to alter how they scrub recovered paper of unwanted ink.

Recyclers’ concerns are still mostly about the future. That’s because analog methods such as offset printing still dominate the newspaper and magazine printing industry, the source of most recycled paper. “By some estimates, more than 95% of the 50 to 60 trillion commercial printed pages are still being printed

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