Episode 4 - Sustainability in Print: From Ambition to Action
In this episode of the FuturePrint Sustainability Podcast, host Steve Lister of stevelister.com is joined by three specialists working across different parts of the print supply chain: Barbara Chaplain, Product and Packaging Sustainability Director at Cimpress, Carlos Lahoz, who leads sustainability strategy for HP's industrial printing business, and Elizabeth Smith, ESG Director for INX International, part of the Sakata INX group. Together they take a good look at where sustainability in print actually stands today.
The conversation opens with a discussion of the wider sustainability landscape, and the panel debated why some large companies appear to be pulling back publicly while regulation and customer demand continue to push the industry forward regardless. From there they covered material innovation, including a detailed look at the shift from PVC to PVC-free banners and the unexpected technical trade-offs that come with it. The panel then turned to data, discussing how scattered and imperfect sustainability data tends to be across a supply chain, and why collaboration between printers, suppliers and customers is often the only way to close that gap.
A significant part of the episode is given over to the Sustainable Print Manifesto, with Carlos explaining how more than 40 companies came together to agree nine shared principles for making print more sustainable, and why the document matters less than the collaboration and action it's driving. The panel also discussed some of the industry's toughest remaining challenges, including production waste and the difficulty of recycling complex, multi-material print products. They closed on a genuinely optimistic note, with the panel agreeing that sustainability is likely to stop being a differentiator within the next five to ten years and simply become the baseline expectation for print, in much the same way quality already is.
Find out more about FuturePrint's work on sustainability: https://www.futureprint.tech
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Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/futureprint-podcast/id1567194406
