Laurel Brunner

For Kodak, reborn and re-energised, sustainability in every sense has become the company’s foundation. According to its recently published 2016 Corporate Responsibility Report (CRR), the first since 2013 when the company had just emerged from Chapter 11, Kodak aims to be the leading company for sustainability in the graphics industry. It has published some ambitious future goals and in doing so sets a standard not just for graphics technology manufacturers, but for large companies in other sectors too.

Kodak expects all of its sites worldwide to be zero waste to landfill facilities by 2025. By then Kodak will have reduced GHG emissions and water consumption from worldwide Kodak operations by 25%, compared to a 2016 baseline. New product developments are expected to aid Kodak customers to make similarly meaningful reductions. These are ambitious goals, especially since they are based on 2016 values, rather than earlier years when Kodak was much larger and its environmental footprint much heavier.

For customers the Kodak Prosper digital printing technology, including the S-Series for hybrid printing applications uses, water based inks containing minimal Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), so they can be classified as nonhazardous waste. These inks also use 80% less solids by weight compared to offset inks and over 90% of the total weight of Prosper printhead components is reclaimed and remanufactured. Kodak recently introduced a new Image Optimiser Station (IOS) that printers can use themselves to treat a wide variety of papers for inkjet printing. Patented Optimiser Agents are applied as a layer less than 500 nm thick and when ink is deposited on this layer, pigment particles in the Prosper inks instantly immobilise and bind to the paper’s surface. This provides considerable scope for using all sorts of paper types for digital printing and eases deinkability and recycling.

Kodak saw a 9% growth in sales volumes of Sonora processless plates in 2016 and a 16% sales growth for its Flexcel NX flexo plates. Kodak has also achieved a reduction of imaging system power consumption of up to 95% for some of its imaging systems.

Another key objective is to triple recovery of spent solvents from external sources by 2025. Kodak has been recovering solvents at its plant in Rochester, New York since the 1920s when it started collecting and reprocessing solvents used in film and chemical manufacturing. Today the company offers what it claims is Kodak’s unique capability as a service. Customers in the chemical industry ship methanol, ethanol, isopropanol, acetates and other solvents to Kodak, and they are remanufactured with at least 99% purity. Over 18 million kilos of these materials coming from outside sources as well as Kodak were recycled in 2016, ensuring that they did not end up in incineration or other waste streams. All of this is good news for customers as well as the environment.

Laurel Brunner

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, HP, Kodak, Kornit, Ricoh, Spindrift, Splash PR, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.

Another week another sector specific sustainability initiative, this time in the cosmetics business. The Responsible Beauty Initiative (RBI) wants to improve sustainability in that sector along with improving ethical and social performance, focusing on sustainable procurement. At the core of RBI is EcoVadis a provider of supply chain sustainability ratings, working with four big names in the beauty business: Clarins, Coty, Groupe Rocher and L’Oréal. These companies have committed to drive sustainability by making procurement companies in their supply chains aware of RBI so that they can share its goals. The RBI members buy an awful lot of packaging, so it makes sense for packaging printers and manufacturers to be aware of this initiative and its procurement emphasis.

The collaboration is intended to enhance sustainable practises with a view to improving environmental footprints and social impacts. It’s also about adding value across the members’ supply chains. And it’s a remarkable declaration, a tacit acknowledgement that sustainability policies can enhance a company’s value and also that the cosmetics business has a heavy environmental footprint. Graphics professionals working with any of the RBI brands should be aware that sustainability policies and practises could be a factor in attracting and retaining new business from Clarins, Coty, Groupe Rocher or L’Oréal and their associated brands.

Part of the RBI will be to make sure that suppliers have environmental policies in place and that those policies are actively pursued. The group will also share best practices and procedures, and use common tools so that suppliers follow common efficiency models. Quite how this will work has not been fully explained, but it will be based on the EcoVadis ratings platform for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This platform for CSR assessment has a system for measuring CSR performance using social, ethical, supply chain and environmental criteria. It is the supply chain bit of this model that will interest printing companies, since the positive environmental agenda of a print services provider enhances the CSR of their customer.

The CSR work that EcoVadis does includes tools to help guide improvements and a scorecard. Scorecard results are shared with RBI members and the EcoVadis network. This is to help suppliers to avoid duplicated effort. The RBI members are signing a membership charter and other companies and suppliers are invited to get involved in the project. Further details are available here: http://responsiblebeautyinitiative.com/

Laurel Brunner

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, HP, Kodak, Kornit, Ricoh, Spindrift, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.

Global-Footprint-Network-Footprint-Calculator

Today’s graphics industry is data driven. From digital prepress through to performance analytics, data is the only way to get accurate printed output and to measure business performance. The need for greater environmental accountability, either voluntary or regulatory, means that we have a new category of data to worry about.

Except that relatively few small to medium sized businesses will want to bother with it which is not so good, because this new data dimension can actually help the bottom line. Companies cite the expense as a reason not to bother with sustainability data. And yet time after time we come across companies with improved profits because of their sustainability and quality management efforts. Sustainability reporting creates an imperative and a discipline which can help make the business more efficient and profitable.

It all begins with a structure, the pillars and joists that provide the basics for sustainability policies and practises. The metrics are common for most companies, within and beyond the graphics business. Probably the simplest and most common starting point is to set targets for energy usage. Calculate how much energy your business uses today on a monthly or annual basis. Then decide how much you want to reduce it over a certain period of time, compared to that base value. A common goal is to use 5% less within five years, which is hardly onerous. Setting a five year timescale also gives you wriggle room for investing in energy saving measures, such as more efficient equipment or new insulation.

You can apply the same model for water usage and volumes of waste, if and how it gets recycled and how much of it goes to landfill. Aiming for a zero waste target can start immediately. Indeed any aspect of the business that has an environmental impact should be considered. There is a surprising number of things you can start doing straightaway, like setting up recycling points in the company and asking staff for suggestions that could contribute to improved environmental impact reductions.

Many companies have developed road maps to help them gradually phase in sustainability initiatives. For small businesses this can be an easier means of grappling with greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) relating to energy, transport and product use. The roadmap should address products and processes separately and set targets, even if the target is just to consider eco-efficiency improvements and how the business is structured to promote best environmental practises.

The graphics industry is the same as other industries in that it is on a journey. The sustainability route starts with a couple of small steps that are easy to take and that can lead to a greener future.

Laurel Brunner

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, HP, Kodak, Kornit, Ricoh, Spindrift, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.

One of the biggest problems for makers of paper based on recycled printed matter is quality, meaning cleanliness. Ensuring that the waste paper entering the recycling stream is sufficiently uncontaminated for use as a raw material for new products is hard. Generally pulp and paper mills rely on a test procedure to check that the inks and coatings on a batch of printed matter can be removed, prior to processing. This is one of the basics of quality assurance in this sector.

That works fine for standard inks, but ink recipes, coatings and curing processes keep on changing. Innovations such as UV curing and the preference for more exotic coatings for prints, mean that new approaches to testing and preparing printed matter for recycling are needed. Paper mills have introduced new processes for prints that may be difficult to clean. But this can make batch processing harder. It requires sorting of the materials to turn them into new graphic papers or downcycle them for cardboard, eggboxes and the like. As waste paper volumes rise along with printing innovations, the need for new approaches to their processing becomes more acute.

Nippon Paper Industries has recently filed a European patent that uses light to separate prints that are easily deinked, from those that are not. It provides a means of quickly sorting printed matter to single out the materials that are suitable as raw materials for recycled paper products. They are identified using light and measuring the light that gets reflected. Depending on the amount of light that is soaked up by the printed matter, the material will be routed for different processing methods.

Nippon Paper’s patent allows for waste paper to be sorted so that the material that is suitable for new high quality papers can be separated from the dross. This solves the problem of pulp pollution from printed papers that have been UV cured or coated with resin films. If they find their way into the production of new papers either intense mechanical processes of lots of chemicals are required to maintain quality. This can cause deterioration in the paper fibres and add costs which paper makers want to avoid.

Treating hard to recycle prints as rejects essentially removes them from the recycling supply chain. The Nippon Paper patent proposes a way to sort the raw material into different categories based on their suitability for deinking. We look forward to learning more about how this will be implemented.

Laurel Brunner

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, HP, Kodak, Kornit, Ricoh, Spindrift, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.

Image thanks to papercut.com, makers of environmental impact apps.

How do you make an environmental impact declaration for print? And why would you want to? These are questions most printers would prefer not to answer, but the second question is easier than the first: customers.

Over the last few years big brands have become increasingly environmentally aware. This occasionally is because the top brass believe that it’s in the interests of the business to do so. Take Unilever as an example. CEO Paul Polman has committed Unilever to substantial growth achieved in the context of an overall environmental footprint reduction. And he has set up the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan to improve the company’s social impact, but Unilever is an exception. Mostly big corporations have become socially aware because their shareholders and customers expect them to be.

As these voices get louder, Unilever and its ilk will want to know more about the environmental impact of print. They will want to see data supporting environmental declarations and expect the products and services they buy to be environmentally accountable. Fortunately there are plenty of ecolabelling options, such as the Blue Angel or the Nordic Swan companies. There are also ISO standards such as ISO 14001 (Environmental management systems) and ISO 16759 (Calculating the carbon footprint of print).

What’s missing is a standard that measures the materials used in all aspects of the printing process, so that labellers can reference accurate data in their environmental label compliance assessments. Currently this is not possible. We have no standardised means of collecting the data relating to substrates, inks, press chemicals, blankets or printing plates, and so on. Accurate ecolabels need tools that nail down the chemicals and materials used in print production, so that it can be communicated to the whole supply chain.

This is not an unambitious task, but work is already underway. The goal of all parts in the series is the same. The ISO 22067 series is intended to help make comparisons of different print production models. This is possible because the series will provide a means for quantifying and then evaluating the specific environmental aspects and impacts of a print production model. It will make it easier to decide which print method to use, based on data related to all materials used in the process.

ISO 22067 deals only with the production aspect of a print media product, not its entire life cycle, so it’s a complement to ISO ecolabelling standards. Work on this series of documents is underway, for specific categories of print, starting with packaging.

Laurel Brunner

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, HP, Kodak, Kornit, Ricoh, Spindrift, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.