Business Management - Sustainability

“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.

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

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.

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.

Black liquor has been a hot topic and meant big bucks to the paper industry since 2007. And when we talk about “big bucks,” we mean big—as in billions of dollars. Let’s take a step back and look at how this whole thing works.

As part of the competition to promote sustainable business practices in xpedx’ supply chain, MBA students from the Net Impact network will develop a survey and scorecard that xpedx can use to document the sustainability goals and policies of the manufacturers xpedx represents.

While News Corp. is claiming to be the first global media company to achieve neutrality, that accomplishment is based on carbon off-sets. Now it is working on reducing absolute emissions. To reach that goal, it has implemented a number of efficiency projects, which generally have an ROI of two years.

I believe that FSC certification in the commercial printing and marketing communications industry has hit a negative tipping point. By this, I mean that the future of FSC certification in these fields is murky at best. I base my assertion on a lot of anecdotal evidence I have seen in the field, both from printers, and especially from marketing professionals and print buyers.

Back when I started conducting green marketing seminars in 2007, there was growing interest in FSC, and a sense that it would become the industry standard. It was on its way there, but it was hurt