The Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
And yet another ISO standard is in the starting gate and ready to run. This one is all about how you can assess the environmental sustainability of your company. It will be a useful tool in conversations with clients who want to know what you are doing to manage your business’s environmental impact.
ISO 19311 is officially called Graphic technology – Environmental sustainability assessment reporting and basically it does what it says in its title. Being able to assess your environmental sustainability is fundamental to being able to control it, and also for sharing the data with interested parties. As sustainability reporting becomes more entrenched as a business function, being able to share your environmental management data with customers will become more urgent.
This isn’t just another layer of admin that you’ll have to face. It’s about futureproofing your business by building reporting processes and habits. And its about having the systems in place to capture and manage data. We live in an age where digital data management is as important as filing cabinets and systems were in years gone by. Having a data capture and management system that cuts across all departments and allows them to share information can make the difference between long term success for your organisation, or not.
ISO 19311 is a management tool for assessing, measuring and reporting a company’s efforts to achieve greater environmental sustainability. And yes that includes commercial sustainability. The standard requires you to take into account the financial health of the business over time, as well as assessing your environmental sustainability efforts.
The document is still in its early stages, but the project leaders have been given the go ahead to develop the work. Over 120 experts from around 20 countries have had the opportunity to add comments to the first draft. This broad input should reflect best practices and ideas from a very wide range of printing companies and other interested parties.
Getting to grips with sustainability reporting of this kind is necessarily complicated. It’s hard to know what you should assess and report on, what sort of format a report should have and who you should share your data with. ISO 19311 is intended to make this process much more manageable and has clauses covering all the things you might want to address. This includes such things as what to consider as part of your sustainable development of the business, how to assess the end of life for print products, health and safety considerations, action plans and what to do if you find discrepancies and variations in data quality.
Most important of all ISO 19311 has a whole section on reporting and the scope of reports. ISO 19311 is essentially a crib sheet for sustainability assessment reporting. As such it will be very useful when clients come to you with difficult questions about your business’s sustainability position. We’ll be working on this project over the coming months, so watch this space.
***
This article was produced by the Verdigris Project, an industry initiative intended to raise awareness of print’s positive environmental impact. This weekly commentary helps printing companies keep up to date with environmental standards, and how environmentally friendly business management can help improve their bottom lines. Verdigris is supported by the following companies: Agfa Graphics, EFI, Fespa, Fujifilm, HP, Kodak, Miraclon, Ricoh, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.
Please also include the Verdigris logo and a link to this website. If you don’t already have our logos, you can get them by downloading the “PublishersBundle”. And don’t forget terms of the Creative Commons license at the footer of the site. Enjoy!