The Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
If you are really serious about improving your environmental sustainability, you could ask Chat GPT to help. Just get the AI beast tell you what you should be doing. Or you could trust a reliable professional human, someone who understands your business. If you choose the human, here are some steps towards improving your environmental sustainability.
The first step is to understand your business’s specific culture, its customer profiles and the motivations of both to become more environmentally sustainable. Understanding what makes everyone involved tick is massive. Once you’re confident that you get this, you can start to work out what it is you want to accomplish. Like most things in life and business, it all begins with motivation.
- So what is your motivation? If it’s improving your bottom line, proactive company-wide sustainability efforts will improve efficiency and cut waste.
2. Evaluate the aspects of your business that have an environmental impact. Examples include waste handling, process control, transport, and raw material choices.
3. How old is your equipment? Are computers, servers, screens, presses, finishing kit and the rest costing you money. Are they energy gobblers, slow, unreliable or inconsistent?
4. Do you know how much it costs to fix production errors and for your staff to communicate with customers? When you get poorly configured production files, you’re probably paying the price of fixing them.
5. Do you manage waste in prepress, on press and in finishing? If not you are essentially setting fire to your cash.
6. Are customers on board with your sustainability efforts? They should be, especially if they are selling goods in the European Union (EU) and have to conform to a EU sustainability laws.
7. Are your transport schedules managed for route optimisation? If not you are wasting money on fuel and associated mileage costs, plus staff time.
8. Have you had sustainability conversations with your substrate suppliers? Be aware that claiming that materials have recycled content or that they are optimised for a digital press is not enough. Get the details.
9. How much recycling happens inhouse? Providing recycling bins for staff and visitors should be a no brainer by now. Sadly this is not always the case.
10. Reusing packaging, pallets and crates is another no brainer that doesn’t always happen as it should.
None of these ten points are hard to understand. What matters is your commitment to making a difference, to developing a plan that can be implemented without costing too much. You can do this through company policies and quantified investments that you only make if you can be absolutely certain they’ll make a difference. It depends on how much you care and how willing you are to invest the time it takes to make a start.
***
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 “Publishers Bundle”. And don’t forget terms of the Creative Commons license at the footer of the site. Enjoy!