A brand new organization has been formed, dedicated to helping in-plants obtain economically affordable and administratively feasible FSC certification. Print Resources, LLC, was created to provide FSC certification at a lower cost to in-plant print operations through the InGreen group certification program.
Vic Barkin
Invariably in a plane or at a hotel I'll get into the typical "So what do you do?" conversation with another fellow road warrior. My answer has been boiled down to a classic elevator speech. "I'm a consultant in the wood and paper industry, primarily dealing with chain-of-custody certification, which tracks trees and reclaimed material from their source all the way to the end user through transparent, credible, third-party auditing systems. FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council, and SFI, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, both offer labeling systems where certified organizations are licensed to apply trademarks to their products and advertising. Anything made from wood or wood fiber, like paper, can be certified to ensure that the material used came from legal, ethical and responsibly managed sources."
As I travel the country in my consulting business, most folks seem to believe in doing the right thing. The grand epiphany for this year is that action is required. Sustainability today has everything to do with being a good steward within your organization.
As companies and organizations catch “the green wave” and start looking for ways to improve their sustainability, they rely heavily on the initiatives of their individual departments. In-plants can play a major part in the overall green success of their organizations. One in-plant that’s leading the way is the Reprographics department at the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), the nation’s largest regional education agency. Thanks to an equipment upgrade, the shop’s Océ digital printers now reportedly discharge up to 90 percent less ground-level ozone, consume up to 45 percent less energy and emit a much lower operating noise level than ever before.
QUESTION: What do Sports Illustrated, Kiplinger’s, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone have in common? Answer: All of them have published “Green Issues.” Unless you’ve been isolated from the world around you, you’ve noted that increasingly more companies, industries and institutions are taking great pains to profess their Green-ness. All of this activity is being heralded under the banner of Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR. (Yes Virginia, there is another CSR. It’s not just the Customer Service Rep anymore.) Go anywhere. Green is a headline. It’s a leading marketing message, and it’s being placed at the head of the promotional line. Why now? This
IN MARCH 2007, Nordstrom announced it would incorporate more environmentally sound practices into its printed products. It became the first of its peers in fashion specialty retail to print on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified stock. As a result, virtually all of the company’s printing partners are now FSC-certified by mandate. This is just one example of how the Corporate Social Responsibility phenomena has turned what was once just a preference for certified paper into a policy in some organizations. In my article from the January 2008 issue of In-Plant Graphics, I explained how the FSC is regarded as the gold standard among forest
ABOUT A year ago, one of my clients came to me and said he wanted me to help his company get FSC certified. My response was F-S—WHAT? That was the start of a journey that has led me to become somewhat of a specialist in the relatively new world—for printers at least—of sourcing from well-managed forests. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, like many, I knew about recycled content, federal guidelines for its use, and a few other environmental paper-related preferences such as acid-free options. But I never gave much thought to virgin fiber or the forests from which they were sourced.
How can you profess savings if you don’t know what all of your costs are? A full chargeback system is a necessary part of running a successful in-plant. This article from the IPG archives lays all the cards on the table.
“I market for the same reason a pilot keeps his engines running once he is off the ground.” – William Wrigley Jr. IS MARKETING taken as seriously as it should be by your in-plant? After all, you’ve got a captive audience, right? Wrong! You’ve no doubt heard about outsourcing attacks. I’m not about to tell you they’re all due to an absence of promotional activities. What I will say is that in-plants that create and foster a positive awareness program among their “stakeholders” have the best shot at being successful. For our purposes, I’ll define stakeholders as: • Supporters: administrators and executives
IT HAS now been 16 years since Heidelberg introduced the first GTO digital imaging (DI) offset press. In that time, enhancements in architecture, quality, speed and control have served to create a viable and sustainable technology. The history, though, has been rocky. Other displacement technologies on both sides of the run length and quality equation continue to compress the space in which DI presses play. Still, digital imaging presses have many unique positive qualities that every in-plant should consider. As an independent consultant, I know that one of the things my clients appreciate is my objectivity. I operate in an unbiased, vendor-neutral environment.
ACCORDING TO acronymfinder.com there are 89 published definitions for POD. “Print On Demand” ranks number 7 in popularity. (For what it’s worth, #6 is “Probability Of Damage” and #8 is “Payable On Death.” Number one, not surprisingly, is “Proof Of Delivery.”) As to the On Demand part, everything is OD these days: movies, music, weather, news, banking, and yes, there’s even Howard Stern On Demand (this author has restrained himself from commentary). Though the term is overused, it denotes anything immediately accessible. Our now-omnipresent resource library Wikipedia states; “Print on demand or publish on demand (POD) is a publishing methodology in which a
THIS ARTICLE will attempt to use the past, as well as the present, to get a clear look at the future of the printing industry. Predicting the future, however, is a slippery slope. Here are some of my favorite predictions, just so I can feel I’m in good company. “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” —Western Union memo, 1876 (By the way, after 145 years, Western Union, has finally gotten out of the telegram business.) “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would
