Libby Interview 1. The cost, they want to be green but the cost seems to be an overriding factor. 2. Payback has to be of reasonable time. For instance we have a power perfector, which is an optimising unit, payback of which was 3 yrs. We did water reclamation payback was a year. We looked at a nautilus system, which is where you recycle the water from the plate making machine, and as much as I could find out the cost of the filters meant that you would never get your money back on it. The cost of the filters, and the environmental effect of making and disposing of the filters needs also to be considered. 3. Hmm… There is legislation in place to reduce carbon emissions. So large printers have to record moniter and reduce their energy they use. How that actually effects... we’re too small, we don’t even register on the levels that they are on. St. Ives people like that, huge newspaper presses, they’re still using… They all had to cut the amount of ip, I mean there are legislative rules in place. Its very difficult because one stick cannot cover all businesses. One of the problems we’ve had that the government could help with is the tender process that is out there, so anyone who is spending over a certain amount have to go to tender, and the processes involved; they keep saying its geared towards smaller businesses but you go to fill in the forms and you need a policy for this that and the other. I mean you can create them and we say we’re working to them, which we are. But when you’ve only got a handful of employees compared to some other companies, it seems like a very impractical way, plus you have to jump through so many hoops. We haven’t got the resources to dedicate to that sort of tender process and then the big companies win the work. Which doesn’t help the little guy. EMAS ETC? Sort of we’ve got emas and iso and fsc. Its more the equal opportunities policy, we found ourselves writing one, we do practice it anyway but we’ve found ourselves writing one just to apply to a certain tender. We jump through loads of hoops especially for the Olympics and we just didn’t get anywhere with that. And equally we used to work for wwf and they loved what we did as an organisation and they went to a print bokers and they had this sustainability questionnaire in which we scored 99%, ticked all the boxes, however won no work, still not sure why, it was a farce. If they have a tender process where its more geared to the small guy… I mean I see why they have them, they don’t want to be dealing with companies that have got environmental enfringements, or aren’t treating their employees well, they have to be audited and have these things in place. Its difficult for smaller guys to get in on the action. I haven’t got a solution for it. There used to be 10,500 printers in the Uk now there’s only 8,000 or less. And its decreasing. PMCs? No its just eco downturn and digital media shift. Some companies recognise the value in the fact that you need all the things to come together so print, social media, digital, everything needs to be knitted together. I think maybe theres a trend for people to produce more smaller quantities, people don’t have room to store things anymore and things change more quickly. I;ve spoken to a number of organisations recently who have switched to digital print because they’ve had huge
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quantities and boxes of litho, because the cost of producing litho hardly varies between 200 and 2,000. So people overproduced what they needed. Power perfector cut power bills between 12-13%. Power perfector is the brand name it is a power optimising unit. Simply things like heat transfer systems, so you take the heat from the presses and transfer it round the factory in the winter and stick it outside in the summer. You can do the water reclamation like we’ve done, you can take the water used on the plate making machine and (depending how your factory is laid out) run it through the toilet systems. Simple things like that. Good housekeeping, if you run a quality like we do ISO 14001, it means you make less mistakes because you are checking everything, which means you wont have wasted paper etc. that’s a huge thing, not having to reprint stuff is also a big saving. Waterless print plates are a third more expensive than conventional plates, the initial setup cost is a lot, about £100,000 to convert your presses to waterless. However there are savings once you’re there, less energy, less waste. Yes I mean we are still here which means we must be economically viable. There’s a lot of people who come to us for our green printing, at the end of the day they are charities and if it was that much more they wouldn’t come to us. We have lost some charity work to cheaper dirtier printing because the funds weren’t there. The problem is, a lot of the printers are pricing themselves so cheap that they aren’t there for very long, and can’t sustain such low pricing. When print is seen a commodity, people are just going to rely on price. I think what has helped a little bit is the government saying people have to (large companies) record the CRC (carbon reduction…) they have to record their carbon footprint. Initially its just their primary things that they record and then theres a secondary level. There’s also a third level which is quite far removed and not many companies record it, which would be the marketing activity, so they would have to record their carbon footprint from print, which not many record. Nobody has asked us for it. However as green as we are the biggest footprint , rather than the process of print (which we lower anyway due to waterless), is the actual paper. Paper is the largest percentage of a print jobs carbon footprint. So if you’re buying sustainable paper that is the biggest thing you can do, as a responsible person. Regardless of whether you say recycled or fsc is best. I know that there’s been a lot of research done by the ex print buyer for greenpeace and friends of the earth and swears by recycled. Wouldn’t know the figures for that. No I thinkt hey are good. Emas better, its harder to achieve and it also measures interactivity in the community. You find a lot of companies with ISO 14001 but not many with emas. I think emas sets us apart from all the other printers. Theres probably 10-20 that has emas and tons with iso 14001. Fsc is pretty standard as well. ANOTHER ONE OR OTHER TYPE? No because we would be paying so much more money. It costs about £10,000 to keep up all these accreditations, huge cost. When we are looking at cutting costs that is always one of the things we discuss, because it is a cost. SYSTEM WITHOUT INVESTMENT FROM COMPANY? You have to pay because you have to pay an auditor to come in, give an independent review and look at all your systems, without that auditor who would say what you’re doing? So
you need to pay, unfortunately, for someone to come in and accredit what you’re doing. If you’re all on the same playing field keep using what you’ve got, don’t introduce any new schemes because its taken a lot of time to get to where we’ve got. Maybe they could be a bit more choosey with iso 14001, because if anyone gets it because if everyone gets it, unless everyone is being totally green, then… ISO CUMILATIVE? You could be really really dirty but because you record what you’re doing, youre alright, you have an environmental management system and youre trying to improve it. Whereas if you’ve already done everything you could do its kind of difficult because to make improvement is hard. We’re finding that, because our production levels have gone down in velocity due to a loss of a large client. Its economies of scale, our figures are always better when weve got more going through the factory. When it dips, all of our indicators go down as well. When I write the emas report in February its gonna be a pain because it will be hard to show improvement. 9. Sadly, I don’t know the environmental impact of running the machines, but the cost of running them is far less carbon than people driving into work. Because when I do our carbon site footprint one of the biggest things that contributes to that footprint is the miles that staff drive in by car. We try encourage people to carpool and one person started to cycle in which is great but few and far between really. We promoted the cycle to work scheme. 10. I think the volumes we get through… so its not really economically viable. With all the print that gets wasted I think its just, if people did nicer prints, more targeted. There are laws in place, the direct marketing association [could] have laws about doing direct mail that people are supposed to adhere to to stop people getting mass targeted, it might help reduce the amount of waste and paper waste. I know they were checking bins to see what unopened post could be found, don’t know if theyre still doing that. And then they were approaching those companies. LOOK EARLIER IN CYCLE? Yes to stop it at source. I guess being print we want more print but that’s my truthful answer. Print nicer things that will be kept and used rather than throwaway print that’s rubbish quality. 11. They go through the motions, to tick the boxes to ensure they get the large blue chip clients that are adhering to government status, however ive seen no proof that actually has won us work with print buying companies, because at the end of the day its all down to their bottom line and how much money they can make from you. So they’ll get the people they wanna use cos they’ll give them the prices they want to get enough accreditations so that they can use them. At end of the day its too driven by profit. You take the middle man out. YOU GET CLIENTS FROM PMCs? No not really. No. Because our prices are never good enough. We are not prepared to sell ourselves out like that. People that get drawn into that get used to the volume of work and make no money on it. SO HAS AFFECTED. Management people are happy because people in the bluechip companies are paying less for their print and the print company are happy cos theyre making money on it, but the people that lose out are the printers. Its got to come from somewhere. Certain printers feel like theyd rather have a massive amount of
work than reduce client level, which means you’re tied to that printer, which is a vulnerable position to be in. 12. The biggest thing would be buying sustainably sourced paper, because that is the biggest issue. Of course energy as well if you can buy it on a 100% renewable energy tarrif, but I doubt that’s available as it is over here. I mean the prices as they are now here mean that its not actually that much more expensive to buy, I doubt they have that there. Waterless would be great for countries that struggle with water. To move away from using chemicals, such as IPA which is used in conventional litho, would be fantastic, as that’s a huge ozone depleting substance. 13. I think it needs to come from two parts, the government and the consumer. Personally if I go into a shop and ive got apples and organic apples id rather have the organic ones, I think a lot of people would feel the same, however if those organic ones are too much price wise you buy the conventional ones, I reckon a lot of people sit in that boat. So the best way the legislation could help is to have incentives there, so if youre buying green energy its not going to cost you more money. Perhaps you coulg get some sort of tax break for being green. EXIST TO SOME EXTENT BUT NOT ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS. We got an interest free loan for our power perfector, which was one of the reasons we got it and that made us greener, so that’s a good incentive. And that was done thorugh the carbon trust (or just energy trust). AND THAT’S GOVERNMENT? It might be an ngo. You also get things like water harvesting, you can get anything for capital investment, so to buy a water harvesting tank you can be part funded buy the government so that buying green equipment is more sustainable. 14. 15. I researched when we first started offsetting and I found people like the carbon neutral company, they were private so I didn’t wanna go with them. So then I found the pure trust which was a charity, 13% admin fees, which sounded sensible so we went with them. We switched to a different one cos we were working with them, and there was pressure from them to offset with them, and theyre another charity so I felt that was fine. Last year we had a lot of investment in new equipment and we had new climate control within the factory. With all this expense I thought actually we haven’t got the money there to offset this year due to spending a lot reducing in the first place, so we haven’t offset and nobody has quibbled, slowly coming off the marketing material and off the website DON’T THINK OFF WEBSITE. Already spending money, nobody ever mentioned it as a huge thing. If anyone has a particular bee in their bonnet about it we can offset particular jobs because before was only offsetting site emissions it wasn’t offsetting jobs that were going out, not offsetting paper or… we can do that individually per job with a paper company, so if the demand is there we will pick it up again. NO REGULATION OF IT. I went for a company who’s projects are gold standard, audited, recommended and that’s where I thought if that’s the case im happy to put our money there. HOW MUCH MONEY YOU SPEND? We don’t offset our energy cos 100% renewable from ecotricity so why should we if its green anyway? So just site emissions, about £1,000 - £2,000 per year.
16. Started off with hard water in Wiltshire which lead to quality related problems, so because of that we needed to find a way to print without water, waterless. When we were marketing it we realised a lot of it was environmentally friendly and we thought we could build up around this and do an environmental management system. So it sprouted from the fact we went waterless. Some would say it’s the wrong way round but worked. Then it snowballed because if youre doing an environmental management system and always looking to improve that set us on the right path. We were there before a lot of other companies I guess. Its not that we’re not green or are incredibly green its just that the company has gone that way and it’s a general way of thinking. We’re looking at new suppliers and new products and that is an element that we have to consider, how green is the company were dealing with, its all part of the framework now. 17. Do you have any screening process with clients? Never. We wouldn’t refuse work. Would refuse to source materials if we knew it was from dodgy sources but never screened our clients, never had any dodgy clients come through. 18. There’s a book we feature in, SustainAble. Waterless website. If you wanted to do a masters theres a niche there. BPIF British Printing Industry federation. Envirowise. Do more sales now. I have to check legal sides of things, government websites. Wrap.org, may be part of envirowise. David Shorto, print buyer for greenpeace and friends of the earth, google emas print, he runs that it might come up, good info. Also we work with a design agency called BWA ball wickham associates and they do sustainable green work with charities, they might have some more valuable info on the design side of things. Main guy is called Webster Wickham. 19. What you wanna do at end of this? 20. Anything to say to graphic designers about less impact on environment? Use less paper, biggest issue. More ink is harder to deink and recycle, also less resource being used, so clever use of design. Any finishing can make work non recycleable, can do biodegradable laminate but better to have nothing. Make sure you think about who it really needs to go to. Also make it nicer, people wanna keep things if theyre nice rather than just throw away. Put a green statement on it, telling them they can recycle and how it was recycled, then people get used to seeing it and think it should be on everything. Government could say that, make legislation that you have to say what something is printed on on the back of everything. Only problem is its very subjective how you record a carbon footprint. I mean BPIF have been looking at a calculator for years and its hard because everyones going to be using different indicators. You can get audited but at end of the day the calculation as I’ve mentioned is 80% from the paper.