In print, however, there aren’t many companies that share this theory – the majority in fact take the issue of sustainability extremely seriously. As a result in-house environmental schemes are taking off, as companies cut down on emissions, recycle and find ways to reduce their power consumption.
For example, as this piece was being written, Nationwide Print managing director Julian Hocking reported that work was just beginning on the insulation and recladding of an office block at the company’s Cornwall site. But this is standard operating procedure for a business that has invested around £200,000 over the past five years into improving its environmental performance.
The roof of Nationwide’s main premises bristles with solar panels, its offices are all lit by LED, all toilets and factories have sensorised lights and it has even just had low-energy Dyson hand dryers installed.
“You can’t take us off the grid just yet but we’re not far off producing more power through solar energy than we actually use,” brags Hocking.
Nationwide Print has been in his family for three generations and Hocking has been managing director since 2000, but it was in 2011 at a Green Foundation meeting at the nearby Eden Project that he was turned on to sustainability.
“We live in the nicest part of the world but this is a business. I don’t do it just because I’m some evangelical tree-hugger, I do it because it’s good for everything to do with the firm.”
Hocking expects ROI from all his sustainable measures in the next four years or less, and plans to keep going; he is looking at investing in an energy-efficient vehicle next year.
Paper merchant Denmaur Independent Papers has just invested in 12 such vehicles, all of which are Euro 6 rated, meaning they are the most efficient diesel-fuelled vehicles available.
Denmaur, which offers carbon balancing to customers on all of its products, has recently become the UK’s first fully carbon-balanced paper merchant, meaning it has its carbon emissions independently assessed and reclaims that volume back by investing in a carbon offsetting scheme.
“We can carbon balance any product we sell so we thought if we are promoting the service it is slightly disingenuous if we are not seeking to do the same thing with our business,” says group marketing director Peter Sommerville.
Since 2007, Denmaur has employed its own sustainability manager. Danny Doogan’s role is to monitor and measure the environmental aspects of the business. Using the principles of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, he devised Denmaur’s Act on CO2 scheme in 2011, which he says forms a cornerstone of the firm’s ISO 14001 environmental management programme.
Doogan hopes the next phase of sustainable investment can be pumped into upgrading heating and lighting systems.
Going it alone
But there’s more than one way to do it. Park Communications, a three-time PrintWeek Environmental Company of the Year award-winner, cancelled its own carbon offsetting scheme in 2014, preferring to spend its money on internal sustainable investment.
Between 2004 and 2014, it was spending around £14,000 annually on the scheme, and since then the 123-staff firm has continued to pump that money into sustainable projects at its east London premises, on the likes of reducing heat loss through insulation and bringing work in-house to reduce transport emissions.
Managing director Alison Branch brought a degree of her personal environmental ethos to the job when she bought into the business in 1992, but she agrees that sustainability can be a driver for profit.
“The environment is very important to us now but there is also a business benefit,” says Branch.
“It means you are more attractive to clients and in certain sectors it is essential, for example if you want to print an annual report for the large corporate companies they would expect you to have a good environmental management programme.”
Park Communications signed up to the EU Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) 15 years ago, and is one of just a dozen printers to have done so to date (that is nevertheless quite a high proportion – Branch believes there are only about 60 EMAS-accredited companies in the UK in total).
Branch says that EMAS is a far more rigorous scheme than ISO 14001, as it involves an independent verification of sustainability figures, whereas companies with ISO 14001-accreditation simply provide the figures themselves.
Recycling is of course highly necessary to the sustainable stability of any industry. Print waste management specialist J&G Environmental has recently installed a new wash plant for materials, overseen by newly hired recycling manager Darren Fairlie.
The £400,000 plant enables polypropylene and high-density polyethylene to be shredded, granulated and washed, and can even recycle water in the process.
“In recycling, I think the biggest problem is that everybody has been reliant on exports [exporting waste] for so long but it is getting harder and the quality of stuff you export has been raised, so cleaning materials is the way forward,” says Fairlie, whose background in plastics recycling means he has recently set about sourcing materials from further afield than just from printing firms.
“If we can handle it personally, then we move it on,” he adds.
With COP 22, the UN Climate Change Conference, taking place last week in Marrakech and likely to lead to further demand for a fall in global emissions, now seems as good a time as any to fail to heed the words of Mr Trump and aim for sustainability first.
