Looking good on paper

Printing is big business – a £14 billion industry with a carbon footprint to match. But a new service could see the sector getting a much better handle on its climate impact.

If they look hard enough, shoppers can see the carbon footprint of a packet of Walkers crisps, a carton of Tropicana or a Tesco light bulb. When it comes to print buyers, who are organising the production of thousands of annual reports or millions of campaign fliers, it hasn’t been so easy to work out their impact.

Not until March, at least, when the British Printing Industries Federation (BPIF) launched a special carbon calculator to measure the footprint of a one-off print job as well as the annual figure for a printing company. It’s the first such tool designed for a specific sector that uses the official principles of the Carbon Trust’s PAS 2050.

Richard Owers, Director of Beacon Press, which became the UK’s first carbon-neutral printing organisation back in 2002, is excited by this new initiative: “Print and paper production generates significant amounts of carbon, but today there are good opportunities to reduce this carbon footprint on a wide scale.” He was part of the working group instrumental in progressing the idea and believes a product’s footprint could eventually become part of a print buyer’s daily decision-making.

The level of detail in the tool is pretty impressive, including data on processes upstream of the printing itself. In all, the footprint covers the manufacture and distribution of the paper (pulping, running the paper-making machines), the print site itself (energy and vehicle use, internal transportation, associated business miles and other consumables used in the print process), waste management, and retail (transportation to the retail site and in-store energy use).

“We’ve tried to do a full lifecycle of the printing process,” explains the BPIF’s Liam Gardner. “But it’s massively complex when you try to calculate the impact from cradle to grave,” he admits. For instance, if you’re looking at inks and solvents, do you calculate the energy needed to extract the oil in the first place, he asks. “So we’ve focused on getting the basics right,” he explains.

So far, several printers – including the Pureprint Group, which incorporates Beacon Press – have taken part in the testing stage. While the results aren’t yet public, Gardner says it’s already clear that paper production is proving the most carbon-intensive element of the printing process. Paper can account for anything from 50% to 90% of the emissions of a printed product. The figure is particularly sensitive to the specifics of production, such as where the fibre was obtained, whether it is virgin or recycled, how far it was transported, how fuel-efficient the vehicles are, how much energy was used at the mill, and what type of energy...

The calculator has had keen interest from major paper manufacturers since its launch, including industry giant UPM-Kymenne, who have provided data (verified by the Carbon Neutral Company) on 38 paper brands.

Owers says it’s a huge leap forward from a year ago, when there was “virtually no published data on paper”. “If there’s one area where we want better and better reporting of carbon footprinting, it is paper – because it’s such a big part of the total.” He points to the fact that the carbon footprint of seven million tonnes of graphic papers (printed paper, as opposed to packaging, and including newsprint) used in 2007 stood at over 6.7 million tonnes – a pretty hefty ratio.

One of the strengths of the initiative is the way it is already getting key players in the sector discussing environmental issues, explains Gardner. “Through the tool, we want to push the message up the supply chain, and get printers talking to their customers and suppliers.”

Within the last year, Owers says, environmental printing has “changed from being a niche product to a mainstream business choice,” and this latest BPIF initiative could well further the trend. “Because there is now an industry standard for calculating carbon footprints, customers can request this information before they place their order. It may only be 10% of the purchasing decision, but if it features as one of the purchasing criteria then buyers can drive real carbon reduction in the supply chain.”  – Claire Baylis

21 May 2009

Claire Baylis