Get to know your environmental profile.
You can’t know how green you are unless you take a comprehensive look around. Measure everything… your paper and other solid waste streams, your energy consumption and sources, your water consumption and discharge, your consumption of thermal and motor fuels. Everything. Calculate your greenhouse gas emissions, too – you can base that on your consumption of electricity (by source) and your fossil fuel consumption. Then go back and see how your current performance compares with your performance one and five years ago. Are you doing better or worse? Where can you go greener? And check your competition too. Are you outperforming them? If that sounds like a daunting task, allow me to recycle a resource that has been sitting on the cyber-shelves at Printing Industries of America for more than a year. It’s called the “Green Guide for Graphic Communications.” It’s a pretty-darn-comprehensive ten-chapter look at green printing – and marketing of green printing – that takes you step-by-step through the process of identifying opportunities to grow greener, measuring your performance, and communicating effectively about your sustainability initiatives. (I should know, I wrote it.)
Chapter 3 of the “Green Guide” includes an interactive tool for benchmarking your environmental performance. There are calculators that help you crunch the numbers on GHG emissions, energy consumption, water usage, etc. The tool helps you get a handle on HAPs, VOCs, and waste streams of every ilk. And here’s the best part. It’s yours free if you are a member of a PIA affiliate. PIA provides the “Green Guide,” you provide the human resources to pull the information together. At the end of the day (or days – it’s a thorough assessment) you will have a handle on your green strengths and weakness – the kind of input you need to complete a SWOT analysis to effectively position yourself against your competition. And the kind of information you'll need to know if you are going to pursue Sustainable Green Printing Partnership certification. (You are going to do that, aren't you?)
PIA’s Green Guide helps you craft messaging that works, helps you avoid greenwashing, and even helps you write press announcements that will get picked up by editors in your market.
If you haven’t taken a look, there’s no time like the present. Check it out here.
