Eco-friendly printing is new agency’s objective
Posted on Jun 03, 2010
Iowa's largest privately owned printing company has formed a nonprofit agency intended to help its industry focus better on a single color - green. Carbon Neutral Print Productions, or CNPP, was formed this month out of an office park in West Des Moines with a goal of pointing commercial printing companies toward "a more eco-friendly approach to creating print media."
CNPP is backed by the joint owners of Rock Communications Ltd. in Newton and Colorfx LLC, which has plants in Waverly and Des Moines. Organizers say the agency is intended to establish a new industry standard. CNPP plans to provide partner printing businesses with propriety software that will calculate the carbon footprint of any given printing job. Printers then will be told how much of a carbon offset they should purchase to make up for the ecological impact of any given project. Jobs that have their carbon impact appropriately mitigated will be allowed to display a special CNPP logo certifying that they are carbon-neutral.
Jon Troen, chief executive of Colorfx, said the move responds to increasing customer demand for green business practices. "At a very high level, we've seen a demand in the marketplace for customers to reduce their carbon footprint as much as possible," Troen said. "Virtually all of our customers want to know what we're doing to be environmentally responsible." Commercial printers affect the environment in many ways, according to a CNPP news release, from the power it takes to run a printing press to the construction of the paper and ink, and "even the emissions released from cars that employees drive to their jobs at print facilities."
The agency seeks to mitigate "all of these print-related emissions through the purchase of carbon offsets" via a partnership with TerraPass, a retailer of offsets in San Francisco that says it has "helped businesses and individuals reduce over 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide." Troen said a handful of printing clients signed up with the new entity immediately after they were told about the CNPP process. "Literally, in the next few weeks there will be inserts in the Sunday Register that are CNPP-approved, and there will be inserts in people's mailboxes," he said.
Andy Slawetsky, an analyst who tracks printing businesses for industryanalysts.com, said printers everywhere are focused on becoming more environmentally aware and responsive. "If (printers) think they can offer something to a customer that the other guy can't, then it gives them a certain advantage," Slawetsky said. "There's definitely an opportunity, especially in this country, for that to be a significant differentiator down the road." National studies show the markets for carbon dioxide offsets growing rapidly.
A 2008 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office counted 211 carbon-eliminating projects at work in the United States in 2007, up from 29 in 2001. A May 2009 analysis by two consulting firms of the U.S. voluntary carbon markets found that in 2008, companies and individuals had nearly doubled the amount of carbon offsets purchased compared with the previous year - to 123.4 million metric tons, up from 66 million. The amount of money involved jumped to nearly $705 million from $335.3 million.
The process, at TerraPass and similar firms, works like this: Businesses that are concerned about their ecological shortcomings but unwilling or unable to pay for fully changing their practices can buy "offsets" by financially supporting projects that cut greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere on the planet. Generally, offsets are expressed in terms of equivalent metric tons of carbon dioxide. According to the Southwest Climate Change Network, a website run by two institutes at the University of Arizona, one metric ton of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere for every 103 gallons of gas burned by an automobile. Roughly 12 metric tons are released each year, according to the website, in meeting energy needs for the average American home.
The TerraPass website lists three categories of projects that company is involved with, including the construction of wind farms, the capture of landfill gases and the "capture and destruction" of agricultural methane. Troen, whose company does more than $75 million in annual sales through its plants, said the creation of CNPP will make it easier for printers to identify and buy required offsets for customers. The new agency also could help Rock Communications/Colorfx if the new standard catches on, Slawetsky said.
"It certainly gives you a lot of pull down the road and influence on potential legislation" if environmental regulations one day change, he said. "Certainly, to be there in the inception of this could have some benefits down the road."