Green Issues - reducing our clients carbon footprint
Green issues are becoming a major focus for our industry as we heavily use paper, plastic film and air transportation.
We have been undertaking exercises for one of our major publishing clients to develop with the greenest solution we can for their titles.
Firstly, we looked at biodegradable plastic film which we are using for the UK market. This film is designed to go into landfill and will eventually biodegrade. There is however an issue with biodegradable film damaging the machinery used for recycling plastic therefore it is necessary to emphasise that it must not be recycled.
Case Study
A client with large volumes for worldwide destinations wanted to produce a more environmentally friendly mailing. The solution was to source envelopes made from recycled paper (that can carry the recycled paper green logo) so as to completely substitute plastic film.
Envelopes weigh more than film so this would have increased the weight we were flying round the world. To mitigate this we have sourced the envelopes in the recipients country and only fly the unwrapped magazines from the printers and fulfil locally using the recycled paper envelopes.
This has had the effect of:
Completely eliminating the weight of film or envelopes flown annually to major markets, resulting in a saving of over 20 tonnes per year of airfreight!
We achieved a saving on line haul costs, by not flying 20 tonnes of plastic unnecessarily, which more than offset the extra cost of envelopes over film.
The client had the ultimate green solution in reducing flown weight, eliminating contentious plastic film and being able to carry the recycled logo on the envelopes used
We were able to preprint the client’s logo, return address, local indicia, etc on the envelopes.We also ensured the quality and clarity of the name and addresses, whilst controlling the data, by printing high quality address labels in the UK and sending them to each direct injection destination to facilitate the local postage.
Clients are moving towards localized printing in the major areas of the world to reduce magazine miles flown and this dovetails in well with our localized fulfilment programme.
In setting up contracts for local postage directly with postal authorities and downstream access providers, our direct injection rates are proving to be very competitive against the traditional methods.
