Last week, the Sustainable Green Printing Partnership (SGP) hosted a day-long Sustainability Summit at Boston’s historic Fenway Park, attracting around 50 or 60 suppliers and printers from New England (some from even further afield). The sessions ran the gamut from a list of easy steps for printers to reduce their environmental impact,, to a detailed exploration of carbon footprint calculation, to case studies, to roundtable discussions, and ample time for both networking and exploring a historic ballpark.

Moderated by Monadnock Paper’s Julie Brannen, the day kicked off with Jeff Zellmer of Kodak offering “7 Ways to Reduce the Environmental Impact of Your Print Jobs,” who began by stressing one of the major themes of the summit—and of the modern print sustainability movement: customer demand. “Just recycling paper or aluminum is not enough for some of the brands out there,” said Zellmer. “There is a lot more we can do.” And a lot of that comes down to reducing waste, which is why Zellmer’s #1 recommendation is to start even before a job gets anywhere near the production floor and “design with the press in mind.” That is, optimize a job at the layout and imposition stage to reduce the amount of paper that is used and thus reduce the amount of waste that is generated. And it’s not just paper: another tip was to “select colors that can be printed using CMYK,” which helps reduce ink, plates, and proofs. Also, using color management software—be it Kodak’s ColorFlow or other software on the market—can also help reduce ink usage by up to 30%, said Zellmer. And using process-free plates can help eliminate the need to use environmentally unfriendly chemicals. 

These steps not only have a common theme of reducing waste, but also of taking into account end-of-life issues, especially #5, as choosing certain coatings may ultimately make a printed piece unrecyclable.