Sustainability in Print Needs Faster Implementation

“Sustainability” is becoming an even bigger buzzword in the print industry—better yet, the entire world. It’s imperative to improving the health and quality of life for everyone and everything on this planet. Sustainability plans, including mission and vision statements, have been present for years. What is different these days is the sense of urgency toward actions and, therefore, a deeper commitment to making things happen.

The topic of sustainability has broadened over time to involve not only the environmental conversation, but also social responsibilities and economic development. Vendors in the print industry are pushing more than ever before to accelerate the implementation of their environmental strategy for buyers that demand products become better for the Earth. In fact, sustainability strongly aligns with many purchasers’ main criteria of quality, service, and price.

Part of the reason why corrugated is expected to have very large growth (besides the fact that every product needs different packages to be promoted, protected, and shipped) is that brands are demanding a shift from vinyl and other less sustainable materials. This change includes retail and event decoration products as well as furniture.

Note: This corrugated forecast data is only for digital printing devices.

Keypoint Intelligence seeks to contribute to a more sustainable world by creating research, reports,  studies, and even awards that will drive awareness and a faster implementation. Just two days ago, we announced the winner of our first-ever Buyers Lab (BLI) Pacesetter Award in Sustainability: Production, covering the years 2022-2023. The focus of this digital production print sustainability award was on vendors that manufacture equipment for commercial, publishing, transactional, and photo applications. While future sustainability plans were considered, ultimately a greater weight was placed on vendors’ current actions and results.

Besides understanding every company’s “zero CO₂ targets,” and other more generic sustainability topics Keypoint Intelligence concentrated more on:

• Product (including parts and supplies) and packaging recyclability
• Product upgradability, which not only protects customers’ investments but also reduces waste and CO₂ emissions via less manufacturing and transportation
• Deinking capabilities so paper can be recycled
• Equipment energy consumptions

Another important part of this equation is company efforts around education so that everyone has more awareness of sustainability issues. We believe that the understanding of the why it matters and how people can contribute to the universal undertaking to make this world better from an environmental perspective is imperative.

“I am very pleased to see how close most of the entries were to win the 2022 production Pacesetter award for sustainability,” said German Sacristan, Director of On Demand Printing & Publishing at Keypoint Intelligence. “This means all vendors are working hard towards improving their sustainability plans and increasing their actions.”

So, which vendor is the winner of our brand-new Pacesetter Award around digital printing production sustainability? Here’s the answer.

A Market Insights on this study will be published in the InfoCenter. Subscribers can log in to view it very soon, while others can send us an email at sales@keypointintelligence.com for more details.