The company
Mastercolour is a £6.4m-turnover litho printer established in 1982, which employs 62 staff. The Tunbridge Wells-based company has clients in a range of industries including the banking, insurance, publishing, retail and charity sectors. According to assistant managing director Mark Lewis, the company has been on a drive to boost efficiency and attract new clients.
"We have picked up some new accounts over the past few months, which have provided us with growth, and since the start of 2011, we have introduced 24-hour working to our bindery," says Lewis.
Mastercolour owns one B1 five-colour KBA press, two B2 six-colour KBA presses and two B2 five-colour presses, also KBA, along with two guillotines, three folders and two stitching lines.
The aim
Mastercolour has been working to reduce its environmental impact for more than four years, partly as a result of a conversation one of the sales team had with a potential client.
Lewis explains: "The client wanted to know what we could offer that our competitors couldn’t. Since that meeting, we have always tried to differentiate ourselves and find ways to add value."
Standing out from the crowd environmentally was proving increasingly difficult even after the company achieved both the FSC and ISO 14001 accreditations in 2007, so it was on the lookout for a further way of improving its eco credentials.
Its existing work had already had a noticeable impact on its costs. "We had reduced the amount of waste we were sending to landfill by about 90% after we achieved ISO 14001 accreditation, which saves us £56 per tonne in landfill tax alone," says Lewis, and the hope was that pushing on would create further benefits.
The company came across the Eco Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) registration, which is overseen by the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) and Lewis says it seemed to fit the bill. In March this year, they started to put together what they needed.
Lewis says: "We were determined to demonstrate our continuing commitment to the environment and we felt that we should carry on showing improvements. EMAS was a natural progression."
The purpose of EMAS is to recognise and reward organisations that go beyond minimum legal compliance and continuously improve their environmental performance.
Lewis adds: "There are currently only nine other printers registered with EMAS so reaching this level was another way that we could make the company stand out."
The method
As David Shorto, a freelance environmental consultant who project-managed Mastercolour’s progression to EMAS registration, explains: "The cornerstone of EMAS registration is the publication of an annual environmental statement that is externally verified and certified.
"What EMAS demands is honesty, transparency and credibility, so the verification of the environmental statement is crucial. Some companies make very misleading claims about their environmental performance, but by being EMAS registered, printers can prove that their claims are actually true."
The first step to EMAS registration for Mastercolour was to ensure that its ISO 14001 environmental management system was running effectively. Companies that want to become EMAS registered have to gather a wide range of data on areas such as gas, electricity and water usage and the amount of hazardous waste collected.
Lewis says: "Mastercolour was already in the stages of collecting this data so this process was actually very straightforward."
The company then began drafting its environmental statement, before being visited by environmental auditor SGS who verified the claims made in the statement and the company’s environmental management system.
Mastercolour’s environmental statement breaks down the printing process into stages and explains the impact on the environment of each stage. It also lists its recycling streams, which include paper, plastic, cardboard, aluminium plates, litho blankets and batteries and declares its usage of energy, water and materials. Finally it lists the company’s future environmental objectives and targets.
The final stage of EMAS for a printer is the actual registration process; the IEMA checks out each company with its local authority to ensure that there have been no environmental incidents or complaints made against it.
The result
Mastercolour submitted its EMAS reports in June and, by 17 October, was fully registered and compliant.
Lewis says that working towards registration encouraged the whole Mastercolour team to come up with ideas to improve its recycling efforts and focused everyone’s minds on the efficiency of its environmental management system.
He explains: "We aimed to introduce one new recycling stream by the end of 2011, but we have already implemented two and there is another one in the pipeline. For example, we were disposing of our desktop cartridges as hazardous waste, but now we have them collected and refilled by a recognised ink cartridge retailer and, for every one that we recycle, a small donation goes to Kent Wildlife Trust."
"Also we have started recycling our broken pallets by giving them to someone locally who makes bags of kindling, beehives and bird boxes out of them, so now they are all reused instead of going to landfill."
Other opportunities identified by Mastercolour as it worked towards EMAS registration were opportunities to significantly reduce its waste disposal costs by both reducing its landfill and investing in systems such as an Agfa Azura processless platemaking system, which has seen the company’s purchases of developer and replenisher – and its associated disposal costs – drop to zero and its water use reduced by 311,680 litres a year. The company has also reduced the frequency of its general waste collection at its main site to one collection of an 8m3 container every three weeks.
Lewis adds: "I also want to point out that our staff were a huge asset in us obtaining EMAS and they must take a lot of the credit."
The work does not stop now that Mastercolour has received its EMAS registration as the scheme is designed to reward companies that continuously improve, and participating organisations have to regularly produce statements on their environmental performance.
The company will next be audited under the scheme in May 2012.
The verdict
Mastercolour puts the cost incurred in becoming EMAS registered at around £10,000, including man hours spent on the project and administrative work such as the printing and verifying of documentation. However, Lewis is adamant that it was money well spent.
He says: "We have already picked up an order to print a company’s annual review on the strength of being EMAS registered, and we have not even received our certificate yet."
Shorto urges more printers to work towards EMAS registration and highlights that in Germany there are around 3,000 companies signed up to the scheme, compared with just 100 in the UK.
He says: "It’s important because it forces companies to analyse their performance, gather data and identify areas where they can improve.
A lot of printers complain about the cost of energy, for example, but they don’t do anything to try to alleviate that cost. Just investing a little bit of time can be enough to bring to light small changes that can make a big difference."
COMMENT
Very often conversations I have with companies start with the question: ‘Not another standard! Why do I need another hoop to jump through?’ So why do businesses continue to go through the process of certification? There are a multitude of reasons why this is the case and can generally be split into two main areas. The first is fundamentally customer led: to try and improve the business, to support a marketing drive or because of the request of a major customer. The second is often a result of legislation to which businesses need to comply.
Whatever the motivation, whether it’s pressure from customers or government, if the standard is implemented well and adopted by staff as a whole, businesses will notice better working practice, reduced waste and other benefits.
What has historically been difficult, however, is the ability to quantify these benefits. Part of the ISO 14001 standard requires companies to gather certain data, so they are able to put a numerical value to, for example, various types of waste and take appropriate action. What a business improvement project aims to do is to enable firms to measure the success of what has been done and identify areas that should be tackled next.
The Eco Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) addresses this: by adding the continuous improvement side, it supports and challenges companies to identify areas that can still be worked on.
Mastercolour did not sit back on the initial benefits that it gained due to implementation of ISO 14001. To its credit and, as the article shows, benefit, it invested significantly in the EMAS to improve its environmental credentials to an even greater degree.
As companies hear more about this scheme and it becomes more widely understood, my response to the question I mentioned at the start would be ‘don’t just implement another standard, but use this scheme to get the most out of the standard you already have’.
Philip Thompson, head of BPIF Business
