The Print Show: Premier Paper plants seeds of ideas

Premier Paper is heading the diversity zone about sustainability, introducing printers to a vital way of thinking.

Sustainability has been core to Premier Paper for many years thanks to a strong connection with the Woodland Trust. As part of its offsetting action, printers are able to pay a small premium to cancel the carbon impact of paper production. This goes to the Woodland Trust which uses all the donations to plant native species trees in English woodlands. It has been an enormous success.

This made Premier Paper a natural fit for the sustainability pod in the diversification zone at the NEC. There will be no attempt to sell paper or other substrates: that is for the stand on the show floor. Instead the aim is education, because printers understand they need to demonstrate greater awareness of sustainability issues – because customers are demanding it. And the bigger and more lucrative the customer, the more information is needed.

This brings in the idea of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, those generated by the company’s own activities, both of internal energy consumption and from the products they purchase. And those figures are needed for customers seeking to measure and account for their own Scope 3 emissions. Printers that cannot provide this data are going to be excluded from tender documents and will find it increasingly difficult to win work.

The pod will help printers understand the glossary of terms, from its own carbon capture programme, through carbon balanced, carbon neutral, zero carbon, carbon positive. It will explain the different logos and what they mean, which are understood by customers and which have little impact.

Printers need to understand the plethora of schemes and certifications because in many cases their customers will be asking for guidance themselves. It is a journey that Premier Paper has been on. The company gained ISO 14001 in 1997, the first UK paper merchant to do so. It also holds FSC and PEFC accreditation. 

The tie up with the Woodland Trust came later and dates from 2008. It began in a small way and has snowballed since. Three years ago the merchant passed the £1 million in donations to the charity, has now exceeded more than a quarter of a million trees planted and captured the equivalent of more than 60,000 tonnes of CO2.

Premier Paper has now extended the Carbon Capture programme of mitigating the impact of paper to being able to certify customers as Carbon Captured Printers by measuring Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and calculating what needs to be done to offset the carbon generated by running the business.

Premier Paper has also had a key impact on the Print Show itself. 

As part of a presentation into its environmental policies and the effect that they are having, television presenter and Woodland Trust supporter Julia Bradbury gave a presentation to a packed stand and was mobbed, as much as is possible in a very polite way, afterwards.

The organisers may not say so, but the following year it invited three celebrities to the show, something that continues this year with Monty Don, Nick Hewer and Frank Bruno. An environmental stance can have an impact.