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Chair of the newly launched PrintGreen initiative Tom Maskill explains how it aims to use real-world data to change the way people see sustainability in print.

The print industry faces continual pressure to reduce its environmental footprint. But the truth about print’s real impact on sustainability can be lost in numerous misperceptions and false logic, which often portray print as being far worse for the planet than it really is.

Earlier this year, PrintGreen was launched with the aim of correcting some of those wrongs and giving both print professionals and potential customers accurate data about the products they are speccing. We spoke to Tom Maskill, CCO of Webmart and now chair of PrintGreen, about how it is doing this.

How did PrintGreen start?

PrintGreen came about because there was a lot of great work going on across the industry – loads of sustainability working groups run by trade bodies – who were creating lots of excellent content, guides and resources. But they were often doing similar things independently. When you are tackling a problem like sustainability across an industry, we should look to solve it as an industry together in a single, unified voice.

So, the original aim of PrintGreen was to bring everyone together under a single voice with the hope being that, together, we can have a bigger impact. Initially, that involved having conversations with the people who led other trade body sustainability working groups. What came from that we called the Sustainability Superhub, because it was about bringing together those siloed operations with a unified voice.

From that we then developed PrintGreen. We launched a few months ago but we’ve been working behind the scenes on PrintGreen for about a year. We’re all volunteers, with PrintGreen funded by industry, but we’ve made pretty good progress in quite a short space of time.

Tell us about the specific issues that you are trying to address.

The key factor from a print perspective is that we lose out on a lot of business because of misconceptions around the sustainability of print. In fact, across Europe €337m is lost because of the perception that print is not a sustainable channel.

Paper quite literally grows on trees – it’s one of the most recycled materials there is – and the print industry itself has been on a huge, huge journey over the last 10 or 15 years to decarbonise to…

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