Business Management - Sustainability

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.

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.

“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.

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.