Environment

With the trend towards greater disclosure and transparency print companies are going to have to get to grips with sustainable reporting. It’s a confusing field, but there are guidelines…

Sustainable reporting: two words that make so many directors feel slightly queasy. You might feel you have a thorough grasp of your company’s impact on the environment. You may even be right. But the challenge is increasingly not just to be green, but to be seen to be green and to be able to prove how green you are. And for the purposes of sustainable reporting, a company has to take a more holistic view of its impact on the world around it, so not just how much carbon you emit, or water you used, but how many employees died at work last year!

Thanks to research by Justyna Spurtacz as part of the Sustainability Driven Innovation Program based at Cranfield University, SMEs in the print sector have a new tool to embrace sustainable innovation. So will you use it?

‘How can ongoing sustainable innovation can be achieved in the printing industry? Building strategic tools for SMEs.’ That was the title of the project Justyna Spurtacz set herself as part of the Sustainability Driven Innovation Program funded by the European Regional Development Fund at Cranfield University. This September saw her release the findings from her months of research and evaluation, which includes a new Sustainable Innovation Framework (SIF) and Sustainability-led Service Blueprint (SSB) which will get an airing here, but will they prompt you to take sustainable innovation seriously?

What ‘green’ demands are print kit manufacturers/suppliers being faced with from the UK’s LFP community, and what are they doing to meet them?

If you’re handling print for any of the big retailers you know how vital your ‘green’ credentials can be to winning, or losing, a job, and that the sustainability argument you put forward increasingly includes the environmental impact of the kit you run. So do you ask pertinent questions of the suppliers about the kit they sell before you buy it? And do you get satisfactory answers?

Commit to renewable energy and reduce your costs, increase the value of your premises, placate environmentally strident clients, differentiate yourself from your competition – oh, and help save the planet.

Switch to solar. The benefits are worth the hassle. Think lower energy costs and protection against future electricity price rises, reduced carbon emissions and one-upmanship in the corporate social responsibility debate. All that and you will apparently increase the value of the premises in which solar power is installed.

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Practicing what IT preaches

Biodegradable graphics can pay