by Graham Garrison

When a customer asks Gary Pawlaczyk about sustainability, he pulls out a photo. Pawlaczyk, senior vice president, sales & marketing for Carlstadt, N.J. Pictorial Offset, has an image of the managing partners and some employees planting a forest at Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville, N.J., offsetting the company’s carbon footprint. Working with the Conservation Fund in Washington, D.C., Pictorial purchased and planted 5,000 trees to obtain carbon neutrality. We loaded up into the bus, brought packed lunches, had a tour of the nature preserve and then physically planted a couple hundred of trees,” Pawlaczyk says. “Coming on the heels of us were the Boy Scouts of America and other volunteers to plant the rest of the trees we purchased over a two-week period. So we have a small forest in a nature preserve of Pictorial trees that are absorbing the carbon that we emit on an annual basis.” Sustainability as a selling point? Pictorial Offset has been incorporating sustainability initiatives into its business plan for years. It has dual ISO certifications in quality (9001) and environmental (14001) process control programs, and was the first commercial printer to offer FSC certified house sheets as an option to its clients,
according to its Web site. It has increased its already large environmental commitment by offsetting its carbon footprint by planting trees each year. 

Despite all of those tangibles, Pawlaczyk, who has been with the company for seven years, says that only recently sustainability has become a topic customers are interested in. “Seven years ago we weren’t even talking about it, we were just doing it,” he says. Things change. Although pricing and services
are still the biggest concerns, sustainability is coming up on the radar. Pawlaczyk says that now when he’s asked to go on sales calls with his reps, almost 40 percent of the time it’s to speak about their environmental measures. He’s asked to speak at about 15 industry engagements on the topic each year. Because of the increased interest, printers
nationwide are creating or fine tuning marketing models to highlight their environmental efforts. Flagship Press Inc. became FSC certified in July 2007. The printer
plans on purchasing renewable energy certificates, and uses
direct mailings to inform customers of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified papers they can use. It’s also using sustainability as a marketing point by purchasing a “Green” hybrid car to deliver products, and “it demonstrates our commitment to eco-reform,” says Chris Poor, vice president of sales for Flagship. Since we’ve become FSC certified and taken other steps to becoming a green printer, we want to scream it from the highest mountaintop,” he says. 

Hutchison Allgood Printing has taken a less aggressive approach to informing its customer base, but still has the information readily available. It has adopted the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and FSC programs, changed inks to vegetable oils and no petroleum solvents, and installed “on demand” lighting controls to cut down on electrical consumption, among some of their measures. Al Hutchison, president, says that if the topic is important to a customer, then they will communicate the things Hutchison Allgood does to minimize its impact on the environment. He says that they don’t sell sustainability to their customers. It is either important to them or it’s not. Any time there is something that a customer values, then there is a selling point or advantage,” he says. “This value is very dependent on the customer.” 

Green in style “Going Green,” may grow in importance to print buyers because of its exposure explosion in the mainstream media. It’s nearly
impossible to turn on the news without a snippet
on the environment. “Going Green” is en vogue, to the point where former Vice President Al Gore won an Oscar in Hollywood and Nobel Prize in Stockholm for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” NBC’s Today Show and ABC’s Good Morning America both did lengthy
series on ways their audiences could “green” their lives, from fashion to home redecorating tips. Television advertisements are boasting of companies’ environmental measures almost as
much as their products. Meredith Christiansen, product manager for Neenah Paper, says in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the environmental push was more of a grass roots effort, locally based. Now, it’s grown to the corporate level. In fact, she says that it’s really being pushed at the corporate level. “A lot of the sustainability initiatives are being driven by the demand we’re feeling from Fortune 1,000 companies, from the Fortune 100s especially – a Bank of America, a Nike, a Starbucks,” she says. “Most people are aware of Wal-Mart, and how they
began to put demands on their supply chain, trying to green that supply chain.” Paper is a major part of that supply chain. Neenah Paper has achieved carbon neutrality through net reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that include the use of Green-e certified
renewable energy and energy saving upgrades such as a process
water treatment plant. The manufacturer joined the Chicago Climate
Exchange, a voluntary but legally binding greenhouse gas
emissions reduction, registry and trading program. “I think companies are trying to be more responsible, more
sustainable, more aware of how they impact the community,” Christiansen says. “Part of that is reaching out to their suppliers, including paper companies, saying, ‘What are you doing? Tell me about the products we’re buying.’ In turn, these organizations — Bank of America, Nike — are able to disclose their efforts in their CSR reports, and it’s reaching the end consumer.” Making it work for the customer It’s to the printer’s benefit to pass on its environmental measures to its customer so that the end consumer sees it. Pawlaczyk says that a byproduct of Pictorial Offset’s sustainability initiatives is that the print buyer can incorporate Pictorial’s “merit badges,” the logos that go along with their certifications, into their printed documents. “They can use it on their printed pieces if they fit the criteria, to be able to show their end users, share holders, the press and environmental groups that they get it,” he says. “That they’re trying to do the right thing via the environment.” Christiansen agrees that those logos can benefit the print buyers. “[End users] are asking not only which certifications do you have on which items and which grades but, ‘How can I pass these logos along to my customers?’” she says. “How can my customer then take credit. A lot of our end users, Target, Nike or Starbucks, they use the FSC and green seal logos. So there are a variety of logos that can be used by the end user.” Providing logos and information isn’t just a step in the right direction for the environment, it’s also a good business strategy. Poor says that green principles will create revenue, and lead to an edge in the marketplace. 

“We feel it gives us a step, or two, or five, ahead of the competition,” he says. Pawlaczyk says that sustainability initiatives can drive sales. “We’ve gained millions of dollars in new business because clients wanted to utilize it,” he says. He used an example of a recent company in the homebuilding industry. “For them, FSC is very [important], in lumber as well as in paper. They saw a perfect correlation with their building business and the FSC wood, to the printed products and FSC paper. The fact that we were the first ones to introduce them to that gave us a distinct advantage in the dialogue. [If other competitors] could accomplish that, what we then went to them with was our carbon neutrality. So on the printed piece, they not only have the FSC logo, but the carbon neutral logo.” Good business Hutchison says that the value of sustainability from a sales perspective is that customers want to conduct business with people who do the right things. “From a sales perspective, having sustainability initiatives is a good thing. It is an actual demonstration that the organization is taking steps to minimize its negative impact on the world we live in.”