The weekly Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
ISO is currently reviewing an important document, the ISO Guide 64. For the printing industry, and indeed all product manufacturers, this snappy tome makes for interesting-ish) reading. Its purpose is to explain how to take environmental concerns into account when creating product standards.
The idea of Guide 64 is to help those writing ISO standards to think about environmental impact for different stages of a product’s life cycle. ISO want their standards to reflect awareness of environmental impacts and ideally build mitigation into them.
The main objective with Guide 64 is to encourage people so that they can improve environmental impacts in product standards. It is also hoped that the guide will help standards writers to “determine when it is possible and when it is not possible to deal with an environmental issue through a product standard”. In the printing industry this could be fairly do-able for products with clear life cycles, such as PET packaging or printed newspapers. But it is less clear for books or legal documents, which may be around for many years. How do we know how products will affect the environment at different stages of their life cycles? Fortunately for print media this isn’t hard to answer because in most cases the answer is not a lot as paper media can be recycled.
The trouble is that for most specialists writing ISO standards, unless they are in a committee with the environment as its focus their environmental knowledge is pretty basic. They are like most of us. We moan about climate change when we see weather related catastrophies in the media, but too rarely think about changing our behaviour in response. It doesn’t occur to us that doing something different can collectively have a big effect. So it is with standards writers, including those working on documents for the printing and publishing industries.
That ISO Guide 64 exists at all is massively important. But ISO should go further and identify which of its approximately 300 technical committees are well-placed to implement the guide. They should then ensure awareness and get after committee chairs to confirm that environmental thinking is being addressed within their working groups.
Getting this guide’s thinking to be mainstream will take a lot, because most people don’t really care about the environment. Actually that isn’t really fair, because we all care about it to some extent, even if it’s only a tiny little bit. What we don’t care about is having to learn the science or change our mindsets to take the environment into account. ISO Guide 64 is a help, but it won’t change how standards get written without considerable hand-holding and motivation.
– Laurel Brunner
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