I can only speak to my experience as an employee of PrintingForLess.com. What I know to be true about us is that when it was time to build a new building we took a very holistic approach. Energy use, preserving sight lines (the mountains in my header can be seen from our deck), air quality in the building for the people and the paper, and what building and finishing materials to use. Everything was important to us so everything was considered in order to offset the fact that high quality commercial printing needs to use paper with virgin pulp in it.

The Forest Stewardship Council certification we possess allows us to confidently tell our customers that the choice of paper they use for their project is responsibly grown, harvested, processed, and printed on from tree to final marketing piece. If it’s important enough to our customers, but only after approval from our FSC representative, we are able to print the FSC logo on their marketing piece to indicate the choice they’ve made. It gives me the confidence that communities and ecologies from where the trees come from use sustainable practices and allow people to benefit from the work they do.

More to Jackson’s question, it looks to me, with only very little investigation, that the Sustainable Forestry Initiative maintains a North American focus while the FSC is very much internationally based. And, if you read their websites you can see that they aren’t handing out certifications like coasters at a pub. As far as lip service is concerned, you need to get back to basics and evaluate your relationship with your printer. Printing is a trust buy, especially if you’re working with an online printer. If you trust your printer to be responsive, responsible, and invested in your success, I would wager that you can trust them not give you any lip about sustainable practices.

This concept is not new to professional sales people. If you want to get the bottom of what is important to someone, ask open-ended questions designed to draw out the information you need. There is no rule that prevents customers from using the same technique. The printer is trying to sell to you … make sure what he’s selling, including his environmental practices, is something you want to buy.

Identifying the source and content of your printer’s house stock should be one of your goals. In my last post, I talked about Post Consumer Waste (PCW) and other definitions of recycled paper. PCW is great for paper towels and packaging but is not a long-term viable solution for quality commercial printing paper. You can only recycle something so much before it’s completely deteriorated. Find the viable middle ground that allows you to get the killer marketing piece you need manufactured with “light green” techniques and materials.

One industry standard that you can look to for guidance is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

The Forest Stewardship Council was created to change the dialogue about and the practice of sustainable forestry worldwide. This impressive goal has in many ways been achieved, yet there is more work to be done. FSC sets forth principles, criteria, and standards that span economic, social, and environmental concerns. The FSC standards represent the world’s strongest system for guiding forest management toward sustainable outcomes. Like the forestry profession itself, the FSC system includes stakeholders with a diverse array of perspectives on what represents a well-managed and sustainable forest. While the discussion continues, the FSC standards for forest management have now been applied in over 57 countries around the world.

Ask your printer where their paper comes from. Ask about its recycled content. Ask about what they do to lessen their environmental impact. If your printer doesn’t know about what he’s trying to sell you, how can you trust what they recommend when you reveal that your environmental impact is important to you?

If you request that a printer use recycled paper for your project, do you know what that really means? Recycled paper, for example, is not the same as paper made from Post Consumer Waste (PCW). In the paper industry, recycled is the term used for paper pulp and scrap that is left over from the paper-making process that gets thrown back into the pulper in order to make more paper. Most commercial-grade paper usually has some recycled content in it. 

Paper with PCW content, as most people know, is made from paper that you and I send to the recycling center every week. The natural reaction is to request paper that is made of 100% PCW content. It is “true” recycled paper as most people understand it. However, there are two very important questions you need to ask yourself. Do you know what it takes to get the PCW paper back into printable material, and what is your budget?

The fact is, paper is probably the most important aspect of your printed piece. Its finish, brightness, and whiteness factors all contribute to the crispness and color of your final product. And although choosing a PCW paper is initially attractive for green reasons, the amount of chemical processing it takes to get PCW paper back to commercial-grade quality is staggering, and the process yields a very expensive product. And don’t forget, that chemical waste has to go somewhere afterwards.

In the end, you’re going to get a better-looking piece at a more reasonable price by going with a printer’s line of house paper stocks. Not all printers and house stocks are the same, as you can imagine. One can go  ”light green” if not green by asking the right questions. More on that next time.