Interviewer:  Hi, I’m Gail Nickel-Kailing, WhatTheyThink Going Green, and I’m here today with Paul Glynn who is VP of Operations for Portland Color.  Portland, Maine, not Portland, Oregon. 

Paul Glynn:  That’s correct.

Interviewer:  Now, Paul, Portland Color is the winner of the WhatTheyThink Environmental Innovation Award for Process.  So, if you would talk to me a little bit about your SGP Certification because that looks at your plant, your process and the “envelope”.  So talk about how - now first of all, you are one of the earliest to get the SGP Certification.  How did you decide to do this?

Paul Glynn:  Well, it was started from the top.  The owner of the company, Andy Graham, came back from the printing summit in San Diego in ’07 and he put the management to task to make the company follow a sustainable path.  It was kind of a natural fit - well, it is a natural fit, because the company had moved in ’05 from a downtown location to a bigger commercial warehouse situation and we had - in doing so, we took the opportunity to re-engineer the lighting in the facility so it all was designed by a lighting engineer and we went with all high efficiency T8s and T5s for the appropriate ceiling heights.  So basically we’re taking it a step further and at that point, we were doing some simple recycling with our cardboard. 

So we approached - we were trying to find out who we go to talk to about becoming recognized as a sustainable company.  So we hired a consultant, MacTech is the company in Maine that sent an engineer in and they created a, basically an environmental health and safety management system.  So we created the bones for that, the skeleton and then we personalized it around the company and what activities are going on in our company.

At the same time, we approached the State of Maine because they have two things going on: one was the Governor’s Carbon Challenge which the challenge was thrown down the gauntlet to reduce your carbon footprint, and so you’d sign on and you would - you filled out a base line year for things like utility usage, if you had a fleet of vehicles, which we don’t, but if you did whatever produced carbon emissions would go down into that base line year and then you compare each year after that.  So we - each year we submit numbers for that. 

And then the Step Up Program was what the main DP was being run via the Maine DP, Department of Environmental Protection. 

Interviewer:  So you combined not only printing initiatives, but also state and local initiatives as well?

Paul Glynn:  Yes. 

Interviewer:  Great.  Thank you.