According to Alliance Insight’s (formerly NAPCO Research) “2023 Who Buys Wide-format Display Graphics: How, from Whom, and Why,” 49% of sign and display graphics providers offer eco-friendly options. The same report found 62% of print buyers identified sustainable production processes as an important consideration when selecting a wide-format print service provider (PSP).
Clearly, sustainability is popular on both sides of a transaction, but one thing these numbers don’t tell us is the financial impact on PSPs. To learn more, Wide-format Impressions spoke with Gary Jones, vice president of environmental, health, and safety affairs at PRINTING United Alliance, and two PSPs with firsthand experience implementing sustainability measures in their wide-format operations.
Crafting the Sustainability Narrative
Sustainability is an all-encompassing process. It’s not just about the media you print on, or the inks you use to do it (although those are part of the equation).
“The concept of sustainability is mutually inclusive of business,” Jones says. “A lot of people think of it as separate — ‘oh, it’s just sustainability,’ and they think about the substrate of the finished product — but we want to change that mindset because it’s mutually inclusive of running your business. People that are running their business in an efficient, smart manner — they’re doing it in a sustainable fashion, they just don’t call it that, or don’t recognize that as sustainability.”
Following that line of thought, the manufacturing process — including everything from energy consumption and employee commutes to end-product transportation and how old equipment is handled when it’s being replaced — is critical to sustainable practices.
“Most of our sustainability initiatives are global, in that we try and source the most responsible materials in the first place,” says Melissa Koke, president of Springfield, Oregon-based QSL Print Communications. “And then we also buy green power; we reuse whenever we can. We are very specific about how we lay jobs out to prevent waste.”
Read the rest of this story on Wide-Format Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
