Design to Print: Blending Great Print and Sustainability

Based in the desert of Utah, Design to Print is closer to Las Vegas than it is to Salt Lake City. In St. George, the city the company calls home, sustainability and the environment are big deals. This is not surprising considering how close it is to national treasures like Zion National Park.

“We have taken sustainability very seriously in our 20-odd years of business,” says CMO Josh Bevans.

Over the course of its time in business, Design to Print was swift to embrace more environmentally favorable printing technologies as they came to market. “We switched all of our solvent presses out to UV printers probably before most of our competitors did, and just got out of solvent printing quickly,” he notes.

“We got into UV, and then we got into water-based printing, and then latex was coming, and dye-sublimation. And today about 60% of our entire output is fabric.”

Searching for Sustainable

In recent months, he notes, the company has started using fabrics that are “ocean sourced,” meaning, says Bevans, “we are taking literal trash out of the ocean, chopping it up and making polyester fabrics out of it.” The recycling doesn’t stop there though. Because of the type of material used, he says it can take back the fabric prints after the customer is finished with them, and “chop them up, and turn them back into fabric again,” allowing the material to be reused a number of times and keeping it all out of landfills. That fabric is then used for applications such as upholstery, which has a longer use than traditional graphics.

“So not only are we coming in landfill divergent, and the products we have are never actually going into the landfill before we use them, but now we’re taking them on the backside and getting a second use through downcycling and making sure that they don’t go back into a landfill,” Bevans says.

Further, Bevans notes, the company didn’t just want the prints themselves to be more sustainable. It took things a step further and created the frames for them as well. “We realized if we were going to put fabric out there, and print on fabric, and work with more sustainable materials, we had to have something to put this stuff on. So, we started designing our own aluminum extrusions, which played right into that sustainability. We had CAD designers on staff and started building what we call ‘F tracks,’ single-sided light boxes, double-sided light boxes — all out of recycled aluminum.”

It’s not just the frames either. Design to Print also got rid of the silicone in “SEG” creating its own beading out of recycled plastic, using its own extruder on site. “And you can just cut [the silicone] off and throw that in a recycling bin when you’re done,” Bevans says. “A lot of our employees have started calling it ‘sustainable edge graphics’ as opposed to ‘silicone edge graphics’ these days.”

Then, of course, the company looked at lighting options for its recycled aluminum frames, choosing low-powered LEDs that draw significantly less power than traditional light box options.

Outlining the Benefits

Offering an example of the benefits of all of this in action, Bevans notes that for one trade show in the Southern United States, his shops — the Utah location is joined by one in Las Vegas — produced 9,300 pounds of fabric graphics. That fabric was used by the customer for several events, and the end result, he estimates, is that as much as 10 tons worth of material was kept out of landfills. “It’s massive,” he says.

“And that’s just one show. Do you know how many shows there are in the United States?”

Bevans points out that there are as many as 13,000 shows every year in the United States, and if even 1,000 of those shows use more sustainable graphics and practices, “That’s just mega … what we can save in landfill.”

Finding Purpose in Sustainable Business

So why are Bevans and his team so dedicated and passionate about sustainability? He notes that it is “in our DNA.” Being in the middle of so much natural beauty, he notes, it is easy to see how poor practices could have a negative impact. Ensuing the world remains the kind of place we all want to live in doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive from producing high-quality graphics, as Design to Print has proven time and again.

Of course, Bevans and his team are never content to simply rest on what they’ve already managed to accomplish, with the close to 100 employees constantly looking for new ways they can improve production and be more sustainable at the same time. Bevans notes that improvement efforts can even include aspects of how product is packaged and shipped, or how to reduce waste. The entire team, he adds, is always searching for the next big improvement.

“This is something we care deeply about,” Bevans stresses. “We’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do. We want to make sure our customers are taken care of in the event world, and that they can also look back at their customers and say, ‘we care about the environment.’”

Design to Print is the perfect example of how sustainability doesn’t have to be an afterthought, and that innovation comes in many forms. They aren’t sacrificing anything on the print side to achieve incredible results on the environmental side, and it’s inspiring to see how business profitability and environmental strategies can go hand in hand.