Writ Large

Printing is an industry that relies on a chemical cocktail, whether shaken or stirred. It makes print works smelly places. But Beacon Press is showing that it doesn’t have to be that way. Julian Rollins reports on the company’s mission to educate the industry and the buyers.

At Beacon Press’s works in Sussex, that distinctive whiff of pollutants is a thing of the past. “You don’t smell it here now because we’ve taken isopropyl alcohol out of the process,” explains the company’s sales and marketing director Richard Owers.

The change is more than just a freshening up, he says. It has been good news for Beacon’s bottom line, too, saving up to £3,000-worth of the stuff per year per press. And of course it has added another green string to the bow of the 30-year-old company.

But believe it or not, pioneering more sustainable ways of doing business hasn’t always been an advantage. And it’s something that Owers wants to tackle across the industry. He’s disappointed that customer perception has been - and to some extent remains - that greener equals poorer quality at higher cost. “We got labelled ‘the green printer’ and we got put in a pigeon hole that not many people were that interested in visiting,” he recalls. “At one stage the company actually thought about playing down its environmental progress.” Owers advised against the change of tack when he joined the business three years ago, arguing that greater corporate responsibility was fast rising on the boardroom agenda. And big names now feature on the company’s client list.

Now that Beacon is part of the wider Pureprint Group, with double the workforce and a sharp upturn in output, it’s working even harder at keeping tabs on environmental performance. The company is recording units of resource use per million pages printed.

In fact, printing more pages has reduced unit costs and resource use per page impression. Between 2004 and 2005, pressroom chemical consumption went down by 41%, energy use by 21%, and CO2 emissions by 52%. Energy savings have partly been achieved through more efficient production methods, including the introduction of a voltage optimiser in the printworks, which drops incoming voltage to the minimum required to run equipment. The company is exploring the possibility of generating its own power with an onsite wind turbine.

This ongoing audit is an essential process, says Owers, but it’s vital that other printers adopt it too. “It’s no good one company of 150 or so people doing things differently when we sit in an industry of 180,000 or so people, is it?” And it is customers who will be the main driver of this environmental improvement, he says. If buyers demand a more responsible product, then the industry will respond. Which means giving them much more information on printers’ environmental credentials so that they add environmental cost to the conventional price-based print buying.

He’s encouraged by plans for an eco label for print products (an extension of the existing European ‘Flower’ logo) currently underway in Brussels. But he’s concerned that such a simple system would leave customers under-informed, lumping together companies with very different levels of environmental performance. “What we really need is a system that enables the buyer to differentiate between the good, the very good and the excellent,” he says. “Then you would get natural drivers rewarding excellence.”

Beacon is advocating a voluntary labelling system that would allow comparison of products, using colour coding or a score out of ten, for example. It’s an idea that would need the support of a verification body, print industry colleagues and big businesses that spend millions on their print contracts. But Owers remains positive: “There’s everything to be gained here,” he enthuses. “Ours is the country’s fifth largest industry, and if you put that with the environmental risks attached to the process and the product, the potential for improvement is huge.”

Julian Rollins is a freelance journalist and editor specialising in environment and countryside issues.

The Beacon Press Environmental Report for 2005 has just been published. A printed copy is available from yvetted@beaconpress.co.uk  or can be viewed via www.beaconpress.co.uk.

7 July 2006

Julian Rollins