http://www.printweek.com/news/785208/BPIF-looks-create-print-industry-standard-carbon-calculations/

According to a 2008 printweek.com article, the British Printing Industries Federation (BPIF) planned on working with The Carbon Trust on a carbon emission calculation system to “end to inconsistent information and to create a print industry standard.” According to Dale Wallis of BPIF, the proposed PAS 2050 would do the trick. These efforts seem to parallel the SPSL’s overall goal of bringing print industry together participants to standardize Sustainability metrics. GHG calculators are a substantial part of measuring environmental impact and the attractiveness of industry and customer options.

Since the time this article was written, PAS2050 has been published. It provides a common way for print companies to quantify the carbon footprint of  a particular product or office site. It is available free for download (PAS stands for Publicly Available Specifications) from BPIF.

The request for funding that the printweek.com article describes is from the BPIF union to the UK’s Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), and outlines a partnership with the Carbon Trust overseen by the British Standards Institute.

In March 2008, BSI released the first iteration of the PAS2050 standards, citing that they were developed using “An extensive stakeholder engagement process, including a first consultation in October 2007 and a second consultation in March 2008, input from expert work groups, support via commissioned research, and insights arising from testing the draft standard with pilot companies.” These standards have been approved by both DAFTA and The Carbon Trust, and are ready to be used by printing companies worldwide. By standardizing carbon and greenhouse gas emission calculations, the industry is one step closer to standardizing life-cycle assessment and other tools used to compare the true sustainable nature of future options.

See the PAS report here: http://www.bsigroup.com/Standards-and-Publications/How-we-can-help-you/Professional-Standards-Service/PAS-2050

(this post was from one of our MBA Students, Troy Martin, who is conducting research on carbon footprinting)

The environmental impact of websites is a topic that is quickly coming into the spotlight as people begin to realize that now, it isn’t our portable devices that are having the impact, it’s everything we do with them. The problem lies in the fact that for every website on the internet, somewhere is a server that needs to be on and consuming power to host that site. While many sites can be on the same server, multiple servers, like Google has (although they won’t say where) speed up such things as searches and puts the priority on speed rather than eco-friendliness.

It’s time to start looking closely at how the internet works and what we can do to make it a greener system. This includes looking at the devices consumers use like computers, cell phones, e-readers; The network we access from them; and the equipment that supports that network.

For some tips on how you can make your own computer use more eco-friendly check out this article by Eco Living Advice.

(this post was from one of our Printing Students, Jade, who will be focusing her thesis on the environmental impacts of printed books vs ebooks)

Congratulations to Dr. J. Scott Hawker (Software Engineering) and Dr. Marcos Esterman (Industrial & Systems Engineering), both of whom recently received letters granting them tenure.  Scott and Marcos have been tremendous assets to the SPSL, with Marcos currently in the role of co-director and Scott working to link SPSL activities with the Laboratory for Computing and Environmental Decision Making.

Summary

The printing industry is currently coming to terms with what it means to be more sustainable. It is widely recognized that energy consumption, paper consumption as well as environmental emissions need to be reduced. A consistent request that the principal investigators (PIs) have been fielding has been to help develop standardized sustainability assessments that would allow the comparison of different printing technologies, printing platforms, printing products and printing value chains. The issues that need to be addressed in order to accomplish these assessments is that (1) a set of metrics needs to be agreed upon and developed that would allow this comparison to be made; (2) the appropriate data acquisition and analysis methods would also need to be developed so that there is consistency between comparisons; (3) the appropriate sensing instrumentation would need to identified along with the proper methods to install this hardware would also have to be developed.

The goal of this research it to perform a survey into metrics and methods employed by the printing industry to measure, track and integrate sustainability into their business practices. In addition, it is also recognized by the PIs that a great deal of work has been conducted in this area by the print industry, but that a proper inventory of the current state of the art is lacking. Therefore, the focus of this proposal is to define the research roadmap that will be required to develop this inventory and execute the first phase of that inventory. In addition to the inherent value of just the described service, this work would serve as the foundation for the future development of a printing value chain test-bed envisioned by the PIs.

By the way – I wonder if there is a calculation for not printing it at all!

Websites:

1) Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) resources: http://www.aashe.org/resources/resource_center.php

2) Iona College Paper Conservation Campaign: http://www.iona.edu/infotech/paper/

3) Macalester College Paper Saving Practices: http://www.macalester.edu/its/sustainability/papersaving.html

4) National Wildlife Federation Campus Ecology Homepage: http://www.nwf.org/campusecology/index.cfm

5) Recyclemania: http://recyclemaniacs.org/tools-strategy.htm