Printers have not done enough to celebrate the strides that the industry has taken towards environmental sustainability thanks to development of technologies which have taken out processes, which have cut waste and which have eliminated use of harmful chemicals.
All this has happened almost by osmosis, but few seem to be aware of it. This lack of perception and subsequent failure in marketing these achievements was keenly debated by a table of experts at the first Print Business round table of the year. The event, sponsored by Antalis , focused on sustainability and its place in the industry.
And more importantly whether the environment was now back on the agenda after the recession years when sustainability took second place to cost.
In itself this has had beneficial impact as in order to survive printers have had to cut waste and tighten up processes, but as with the impact that the introduction of computer to plate had on film consumption and processing, few think of this as an environmental benefit that can be marketed to customers. But few do.
“There needs to be better communication around what the printing industry is already doing about becoming more sustainable and to drive this message across the end users of print.” says Andy Seal, from the Department of Transport. “Printers may well be doing this, but they are not blowing their own trumpet about it.”
That came towards the end of a session which had started by considering whether the tide which had pushed sustainability away as an issue was on the turn. The participants had a vested interest in the subject, and perhaps a lean and hungry look because of it. Seal had been in charge of setting up paper specification purchasing frameworks across government which placed recycled papers at the forefront of decision making.
However, in the last four years his remit has changed and at the same time responsibility for government decisions has passed through the OGC, Buying Solutions and into Crown Commercial Services. “In the last two or three years I’ve become involved with mainstream procurement processes,” he says, “but still maintaining a category lead role for print.”
The feeling remains that government should use recycled papers ‘as the first choice’, but price and availability can get in the way. “There’s still a desire to recycle as much government waste as possible and then reuse that in government offices where it comes back as printed or office paper.” In short central government wanted to establish a closed loop system for paper, collecting paper across government offices.
It has not been as successful as had been hoped with collection falling short of what had been planned.
In turn the shortfall makes it less attractive for the paper companies collecting the fibre for processing. “The principles around that are sound, but there is still more to do,” says Seal.
Waste collection rates are good, an estimated 72% of all paper in the UK is collected for recycling, which has been part of the problem, Matthew Botfield, Antalis UK environmental manager. “Collecting paper in a closed loop system may not be the best way to go. It means having to change the existing processes and waste material collection,” he says.
Botfield points out that 80% of the papers that Antalis supplies are recycled or covered by FSC or PEFC certificates to prove sustainable sourcing.
Demand for recycled papers has fallen, but not the requirement for sound information about paper. “Fewer of our customers are asking for recycled papers,” says Julian Barnwell, joint managing director of Barnwell Print. “Carbon balanced paper is an easier concept to sell.” In a wider context, the EU, Botfield explains, is working on the Product Environmental Footprint, a scheme that is intended to provide a sustainability value to different types of product.
“The aim is to have a lifecycle statement for products and services sold in Europe,” he says.
It is early days. There are 16 pilot projects underway, involving carbon calculation, recyclability and taking the UK’s PAS 2050 concept as a model. “Having a European standard will have more meaning,” he adds.
Within print and paper, there are paper profiles and Cepi’s ten toes approach for assessing the impact of paper, but as it is still difficult to compare a mill in one country to a mill in another. There is a hope that PEF will mean a simplification of the different rating systems, says Botfield. “Carbon is included, so is water and energy inputs. It will be a combination of experiences from other industries.”
There is no timetable for PEF to emerge as a real proposition. In the meantime, Antalis is coming out with its own simple to follow method of ranking papers, following a Green Star system to provide an objective way to comparing different papers.
Recession has had an impact on the environmental agenda, says Two Sides UK country manager Jonathan Tame. “Back in the 1990s and the early years of this century, companies became focused on their environmental position because of NGO pressure. As a result most large organisations and government implemented robust long term strategies about their impact. The recession has led to a greater focus on cost, but there is a still a focus on continual improvement and on reducing impacts generally.
“Within the paper sector, mills have become more efficient, have implemented energy programmes to cut costs and have generally done a good job in publishing information about this. Print and paper has a good sustainability story so it is important that the industry continues to provide this information. The anti paper comments about saving forests are not true and this is not helpful to a robust industry set on reducing its impact.”
Barnwell says: “I do not need other companies telling the end user that email is a sustainable way to communicate. The problem is that sales teams are not generally equipped with the knowledge and confidence to communicate with their customers about sustainability issues.”
When they do, he adds, customers can be receptive. Barnwell Print has a strong environmental ethos driven by its two managing directors which has taken it into carbon offsetting and balancing schemes with its paper suppliers.
“We have created a dedicated PDF about our carbon balancing work,” he continues, “and we encourage our customers to make an environmental statement. We provide a certificate to show how much carbon has been saved. We don’t see too many other printers doing that.”
Botfield agrees: “At Antalis we produce fact sheets but there is a bit of a fear of reading something and then pitching to your client if the client knows more than the sales person. It’s why we have been trying to simplify the knowledge with a range of videosrange of videos that printers can use in these presentations.
“We have the same problem in balancing the knowledge between the sales person on the phone and the executive on the road. It’s having the confidence to know whether this paper is more sustainable and why the customer should select the more sustainable paper. This is why we introduced the Green Star system.”
It is hardly surprising that the sales people are not able to explain a sustainability argument, says chartered environmentalist and former print buyer Clare Taylor. “The meaning of sustainability is still not fully understood. It is seen as the environment, whereas sustainability combines social and financial elements. The paper and capital equipment manufacturers have got it. They are investing in their staff and looking at efficiency and making themselves financially sustainable.
“Printers and designers however do not understand sustainability. They have seen becoming green as an expensive add on.”
Barnwell Print does not. “We looked closely at all our processes. We saw we were spending a lot on oil and lot on electricity and on how much waste we produced,” says Barnwell. “And then some started asking had we looked at biomass generation rather than burning oil for 16 hours a day?”
The sustainability story can also be a strong one for printers wanting to set themselves apart. Tame explains: “Printers are realising that just putting ink on paper is not enough to win the customer relationship. The difference can come from providing management information, holding stocks and there are some savvy printers who have recognised that the environment can be part of their sales story.”
“Because when printers go to clients they can talk about the benefits of the equipment and what it can produce,” Seal adds.
“It’s where trade associations should be there to support their members by providing this information,” Tame continues.
The companies that can adapt and do adopt a sustainable model for their business will win Tame believes. Taylor points to the success that the Marks & Spencer Plan A initiative has had in cutting its environmental impact.
“Many printers see ISO standards as a cost,” Tame says, “but those that implemented it and have done the cost analysis afterwards, have found that their business is more focused on the best use of resources and that it therefore makes them money.”
Taylor agrees saying that a survey of SME business carried out by Defra, found that the cost of gaining certification was outweighed by the savings, and that the more it was embedded in their business, the greater the savings. “If you embed it, it’s a valuable tool, eco bling is expensive,” she says.
It clearly remains a confusing issue for printers with only a minority of them having the ISO qualification, though rather more have FSC or PEFC as a result of customer pressure. The Antalis Green Star system is intended to provide a clear and fast way to interpret the qualities of each paper (“everything we sell is flat, is white and has four corners” Bottfield jokes.). A no star paper is one produced with no provenance for the fibre and no back up for production, and would not be offered by Antalis. A minimum one star paper comes with EUTR fibre and from a mill with ISO 14001, FSC and PEFC add a further qualification and so it continues to the recycled papers with the greatest rating.
Experience has shown that this does not always work. Around the table there are memories of Brand Paper’s Eco check system which attempted to categorise paper in the same straightforward way, but perhaps because the time was not right, it failed to take off. Likewise WWF’s rating of papers is not widely used.
“We are hoping that the Green Star system will make it easier to talk about sustainability,” says Botfield.
However, talking might in itself be difficult. The question of the obstacles that printers can face in adopting more sustainable working practices and promoting this come down to one thing says Barnwell. “Time.
“Time is a big issue and finding a way of getting quality time in front of people to explain the benefits in what you can do. Recession has meant we have all stripped out jobs and we are all wearing so many different hats. Then there is that perception that anything to do with sustainability must be a cost for a small organisation.
“Our biggest barrier is the lack of time that customers have available to them.”
For Seal there is a distinction between those printers choosing to adopt sustainability and those that have it thrust upon them and makes a strong point about the emphasis on the sustainability of the paper. “When in discussion with customers, printers should promote their own efforts to be sustainable rather than promote paper companies’ products.”
“The printing industry isn’t very good at talking about what they have done in terms of reducing impacts over the years,” Tame agrees, adding: “There is a lot of information in the public domain and so very few barriers to prevent printers learning about sustainability. The biggest challenge is that everyone is so time challenged today.”
Taylor makes another point about the insularity of the industry. “There is so much best practice from other industries that printers can use, but printers very rarely look outside of print. Lean manufacturing was widely adopted in the car industry, but not in print until Vision in Print. Before then printers did not think about the long term benefits of becoming more lean. Vision in Print showed them that there was a demonstrable return on investment.”
This has worked with larger printers which realise that in order to get the maximum benefit from their presses they must be lean and resource efficient, especially with the industry still suffering the effects of overcapacity.
“Small and mid sized printers should be focusing on production efficiencies,” explains Tame. “And those general business efficiencies go hand in hand with sustainability,” Taylor adds.
The whole issue is crucial to print’s role in the communications mix. It is the raison d’être of Two Sides. “Our challenge is to show that print has a lower impact that many think and to remind others that digital has an impact too,” Tame says.
“In an increasingly digital world, print has an increasingly demonstrable ROI, often more so than digital alternatives. For one thing print and paper is one of the most sustainable industries there is, not just because of recycling waste, but also because raw materials are sustainable,” continues Tame.
Winding the clock back, Botfield recalls the excitement of his first email address, at a time when marketing was concerned with ‘spray and pray’ print campaigns. That has come full circle and ‘spray and pray’ belongs to email while the excitement can come from print.
“We can provide real numbers about the effectiveness of a direct mail campaign,” he says. “Television on the other hand is becoming less effective because of changes in viewing towards Netflix and others.
“The future has to be about fusing the digital and print together, about the emotional appeal of what you can touch.” As a product manager at Antalis, he lives the experience. “We spend a lot of money on marketing and we consider ourselves to be fairly good and knowledgeable, but we are only just embracing how we can bring the two worlds together.”
This has been through the addition of QR codes to allow readers access to more information, more product sheets and data than can be included on the printed page and access to material that might otherwise be lost. “As stakeholders in the industry, we have embraced innovations and new ideas and have swung from one medium to the other,” he explains. “Now it’s about getting the best from the different media and making them work together.”
As a consumer, he relates the experience of looking for a new car, where different messages are conveyed through the manufacturer’s website, through its YouTube channel and through the printed brochure. They continue to stand alone, whereas Botfield wonders why the printed brochure should not be the key that unlocks access to the videos or the web page. “The car manufacturers have not got it,” he says.
Barnwell has direct experience as his company is the first to use Ricoh’s image recognition based Clickable Paper application. There are no QR codes to display for each link to a dumb home page. Instead the viewer can access different kinds of content which can also be changed to a new promotion or to keep information up to date.
It was used for a Norfolk Broads holiday company to launch an instructional video on how to moor the cruiser. It was also used to offer customers the chance of a virtual tour of one of the boats in the fleet. That was the first to be booked out completely for the season says Barnwell. For this season, more cruisers have the walk around and there are 72 pieces of content that can be accessed from the app.
“They took a marketing decision on the back of the success of the printed brochure,” says Barnwell.
The appeal of using print as the Trojan horse to capture a user and bring him to a website is also that the action generates data that can be used. “This sort of thing is far more attractive than QR codes,” says Tame. “It’s about putting the digital experience into the consumers’ hands. The brand in their hands.”
Those hands will be checking links on packaging to access allergy or recipe information on food packaging. “We call it interactive print,” says Barnwell. “It makes people recognise the benefits. They don’t really get augmented reality, but this makes sense. And the uptake of digital versions of the magazines we print is abysmal.”
However, while this togetherness points to a sustainable future for print, there is still the twin issues of educating print sales people not to be motivated by volume, but by effectiveness and also educating the marketing decision makers, many under 30 years of age and so steeped in the digital technology and who in a short career have been instructed to cut back on print spending.
At Barnwell this can mean discussing options such as pointing out that rather than adding a coating to a matt or silk coated paper, on a longer run job, the budget can be achieved by using a gloss coated paper instead. “They can do more with the same budget,” he says.
There are high barriers to overcome. Government has a ‘digital first’ policy Seal points out. Documents are available to download from websites, but printed versions are scarce even for those without access to the internet. “Printers have to use their expertise,” he says. “There is a generation of print buyers who are not experts, where buying print is just part of their function. As a result there is more reliance on printers to work with them to manage costs and provide recommendations on the best way to print and perhaps alternatives to print.”
For those who want to be sustainable, Taylor adds, this can mean ensuring that the recycled paper chosen is not printed and finished in such a way that recycling is not possible. “Collaborative working practices are essential to ensure that products are recyclable at end of life and that designers understand the embedded energy impact of what they specify,” she says.
This is a long way from the position most printers are currently in, which in turn is a long way from the position not so long ago when being sustainable meant using a paper with a badge on it, as Seal explains, was enough.
“Sustainability is now about better communication around what the printing industry is already doing.”
That is endorsed by all around the table, with a call to take the message into the design colleges to ensure that the next generation of specifiers understands where the role of print is. “Sustainability is very much on the government agenda and that will continue to be so.”
“Technology is moving this industry to become more sustainable,” comments Tame. “I don’t think sustainability is off the agenda.”
Andy Seal is print and marketing category specialist at the Department for Transport. He has a long history in print and publishing in the public sector and currently, among many other tasks, works with the publishing team at the DoT in developing and embedding print and publishing protocols for the effective production of departmental published content.
