Winning ways
Like Mastercolor, Park also communicates its environmental message to clients via its sales and customer services team and through Park’s regular news update, Parklife. And it puts itself forward for prestigious industry awards, which can also be a great marketing tool, according to Richard Owers marketing director at Pureprint, which, like Park, is a past winner of PrintWeek’s annual Environmental Company of the Year Award.
“One benchmark that’s incredibly useful for buyers is to ask whether or not companies have won awards and, if they have won awards, what were they for and who were they awarded by. If a company claims it is one of the greenest in the country, but it hasn’t won anything, then is that company proud of what it’s doing and do they stand up to closer scrutiny?” says Owers. “However, if a third party has judged an awards submission and decided it’s better than anything else that they’ve seen that year, then it’s something to be proud of and is a useful way of illustrating what you do and what third parties think of you.”
Pureprint also has an educational strategy in place, which it refers to as ‘supportive sustainability’. “It’s all about sharing knowledge,” says Owers. “We want to share ideas around best practice and help customers improve the environment, but you can only do this if you’re genuinely interested in a subject.”
He believes that it’s the company’s interest in and care of the environment that sets it apart from those outfits that just go through the motions.
“Box-ticking is quite widespread, but the number of people that are genuinely interested in and care about the issues are a lot fewer and if I were a print buyer it would be those companies that I would want to partner up with,” adds Owers.
To a large extent, it’s the emergence of so many different – and sometimes conflicting – schemes over the past decade that is responsible for this box-ticking. It’s a view shared by Two Tomorrows’ Rob Pearson. “There are too many certification schemes around that do the same thing. Take paper as an example. There are a number of schemes you can go for, but they all set out to do the same thing which is to say that this paper is from a sustainable source. I would argue that you don’t need all of them,” says Pearson.
Indeed, he feels the industry is becoming over reliant on certification schemes and that, while they should be part of the picture, the focus needs to be on a company’s overall approach to sustainability.
“There’s a real danger that we will reach a situation where people are just fighting over who can get the most certifications after their name, but when you reach a situation where all printers have all of the available certifications, then where do you stand?” says Pearson.
Park’s Branch concurs with Pearson that the existence of so many certification schemes makes it difficult to establish which eco badge is more beneficial. “The problem is that within the eco certifications there are no levels of achievement,” she explains. “One printer could be just scraping through and still receive certification, while others might be over achieving without any recognition. If the accreditation bodies were able to create a tiered system of achievement it would avoid printers having to gain further certifications to distinguish them from the competition.”
This is one solution to the problem. Another would be to create one all-encompassing scheme that covers the whole printing industry, rather than lots of smaller competing schemes, but the general consensus at the moment is that is unlikely to ever happen. In the meantime, it looks as if it’s a case of horses for courses, with Mastercolor’s Lewis arguing that there is a place for all of the schemes thanks to the sheer diversity of the printing industry, it’s just a matter of communicating them properly.
“If a small business has worked hard to get Greenmark and that’s the first green standard that they’ve got then it’s positive for them, it’s positive for their client and it’s positive for the environment,” says Lewis. As long as they tell people about it properly, of course.
PrintWeek's 60-second guide to eco badges
Carbon Neutral Numerous offsetting schemes allow businesses to ‘offset’ the carbon that a company produces as a result of its manufacturing processes
EMAS The Eco-Management and Audit Scheme is the gold standard and recognises those businesses that go beyond minimum legal compliance. Only a handful of printers have attained EMAS status
FSC Printers who have been approved by the Forest Stewardship Council Chain of Custody scheme can produce work carrying the FSC logo
Green Dragon Similar to Greenmark in that it’s aimed at companies looking to boost their green credentials, but aren’t geared up for ISO 14001
Greenmark Appropriate for SMEs who lack the resources to go for ISO 14001
ISO 14001 One of the commonest certifications in the printing industry, this provides a framework for on-going monitoring and continual improvement
