The weekly Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
Pushing the value of environmental awareness has been tough over the last forever of business slump and economic drear. But that doesn’t mean the environment has fallen from everyone’s agenda. Kodak and Agfa plus a bevy of their customers have stuck to their eco-guns and their efforts are bearing fruit. The two manufacturers have set up environmental awards programmes to recognise their customers’ environmental initiatives and recently announced the winners: http://bit.ly/1a40hVt and http://bit.ly/1gdxrG9
The judging criteria of these two programmes reflect the huge range in approaches for recognising environmental initiative in the graphic arts. Agfa set up the international Sustainability Awards program at the beginning of 2013 to recognise and honour its customer’s environmental efforts. Kodak’s recently inaugurated Sonora Green Leaf Award is specific to Europe and to users of the Sonora processless plate. The Kodak Green Leaf winners are all commercial printers who monitor energy and water usage and constantly strive to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, working with processless plates to do so.
The Agfa Sustainability Awards have a much broader remit and are intended for graphic arts companies all over the world, from large format commercial offset printing, through to newspaper printing and digital printing. The Agfa winners come from all sectors of print and both the Agfa and Kodak awards recognise excellence in production as well as general environmental policies.
This matters for the award recipients and for their customers and it is great that Agfa and Kodak are promoting them. In doing so the two manufacturers promote the excellent work printers are doing in environmental impact management. It lays a foundation for more specific awards categories in the future such as carbon footprint reduction.
Celebrating the achievements in environmental impact improvement encourages the wider graphic arts market to take the topic seriously. Awards programmes help to highlight how environmental management initiatives can enhance business performance. In the graphic arts they also help push environmental awareness up the agenda. And print buyers have an additional tool for sourcing environmentally aware service providers. This is probably the best reason of all to have them.
– Laurel Brunner
This blog is yours to use if you want, as long as you fully credit the Verdigris supporters who make it possible: Agfa Graphics (www.agfa.com), Digital Dots (http://digitaldots.org), drupa (www.drupa.com), EFI (www.efi.com), Fespa (www.fespa.com), Heidelberg (www.uk.heidelberg.com), Kodak (www.kodak.com/go/sustainability), Mondi (www.mondigroup.com/products), Pragati Offset (www.pragati.com), Ricoh (www.ricoh.com), Shimizu Printing (www.shzpp.co.jp), Splash PR (www.splashpr.co.uk), Unity Publishing (http://unity-publishing.co.uk) and Xeikon (www.xeikon.com).