The Sustainable Green Printing Partnership (SGP) is piloting a project to expand its certification programme beyond the US/Canada.
SGP has been holding all programme audits virtually for more than a year and believes that using this method, it can expand internationally, allowing printers and industry suppliers worldwide to achieve SGP certification. Through its cloud-based SGP Impact Tracker, information for a virtual audit is quickly and effectively shared with SGP’s independent auditors.
“SGP certified facilities must renew their certification every two years,” said Wendy Nadan, SGP lead auditor. “In 2018, SGP released the SGP Impact Tracker which helps facilities monitor sustainability performance over time and benchmarking efforts against an aggregate of other facilities. With enhancements, the Tracker provided a virtual audit solution for the current global situation. The new features of the Impact Tracker inspired us to rethink how we could extend the SGP certification to countries outside of North America. From the initial certification planning meeting to the completion of document review including photographic evidence, all can be accomplished virtually with the local sustainability team. Each facility can meet the expectations of the audit as if an SGP auditor were physically on-site.”
For more than ten years, SGP certification has been driving sustainable activities in the printing industry. With its sustainability management system and annual improvement projects, SGP certified facilities are industry leaders in providing sustainable printing and independent validation of their claims for a sustainable supply chain. SGP certification is given to facilities meeting rigorous standards of the criteria developed by SGP. This is the only whole-facility certification programme developed as a collaborative effort of the printing industry to define what it means to be a sustainable printer and to offer credible validation by a third party.
“SGP has had a number of requests from printers in Europe and Asia to get certified. With the power of our SGP Impact Tracker and our revised certification criteria, SGP will be able to test the feasibility of extending its certification to the worldwide market,” said Marci Kinter, SGP co-founder, SGP Technical Committee chair and Printing United Alliance representative.
The SGP certification pilot programme will be launched in October 2021 with the next revision of the SGP certification criteria, which is adopted after a public review process every five years. More programme details including the application for pilot testing will be released in August 2021.