Elanders Hindson puts environment at heart of operations

Elanders Hindson has a Swedish parent company and takes a very Scandinavian view to ensuring that its operations have minimal impact on the environment.

Elanders Hindson is part of the expanding Elanders Group, an infomedia company that has expanded with its customers to 16 companies operating in Sweden, Austria, China, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Brazil and the UK. It first arrived here with a typesetting business in Harrogate more than 20 years ago, followed in 1999 by the acquisition of Tyneside printer Hindson Print. In all Elanders employs 1,500 staff, generating a turnover of £140 million. In the UK Elanders Hindson has 155 staff and sales of £19.3 million.

The business comes from a variety of sectors, but one which Elanders has made its own is the production of manuals to accompany white goods and especially cars. The UK company produces so called glovebox literature for the likes of Land Rover, Toyota, Vauxhall and Bentley, this expertise leading to a £200,000 investment last year to further cement its position in this sector. In turn this led to signing contracts valued at £5.5 million for this year.

Winning such business is more than just competence in print production. Its skills lie in communicating the right information at the right time using the right medium, hence it is an infomedia company rather than a print company. If a CD-Rom is the best way to communicate, then Elanders will produce the CD-Rom. This is achieved through investment in the necessary project management and cross media production workflows which can be customised to meet the needs of each client. And a key and growing need is good environmental performance. Elanders scores well being able to analyse the entire process and propose solutions, even to issues which the client has not yet spotted. This will almost certainly include minimising waste both during production and through obsolescence and other measures to reduce any environmental impact.

Thanks to its worldwide reach Elanders is able to stay ahead of legislation. Environmental managers from each plant will meet to discuss trends and ensure that best practice is shared across the operation. At Elanders Hindson this is backed by an environmental committee constantly looking for ways to reduce waste, for more environmentally friendly processes and for changed working practices. Challenging performance targets are set and monitored to ensure that they are met.

Last year for example the company set a target of cutting CO2 emissions by 200 tonnes. This was largely achieved by changing its heating system from one which took in cold air from outside the building and warmed it to the right temperature for one which used air already in the building to lift the temperature. The new system was designed by one of the company’s own engineers and was an investment of £3,500 to implement. It resulted in a saving of £24,000.

Elanders Hindson already sources its electricity from renewable sources. This is a little more expensive, but results in a cut in the Climate Change Levy it would have to pay, so equals out the overall cost. In future this decision will also make it easier to assess the company’s carbon footprint in preparation to go carbon neutral or become carbon balanced. Energy use this year will be cut further as a capacitor, designed to capture power that might otherwise have been lost, was installed at the end of 2006. It’s still too early to say exactly what impact this will have on energy consumption, but such investments have had a substantial impact elsewhere.

Energy use is also being cut through encouraging company drivers to drive with fuel consumption in mind. A guide with advice on accelerating gently, switching off the engine in traffic and so on has been welcomed and has led to unofficial rivalry between drivers trying to achieve the best fuel consumption figures. In the pressroom there has been a large swing to vegetable oil inks. In 2000 just 18% of the inks the company used were based on renewable vegetable oils. Last year this had risen to 99% of inks. At the same time heavy metal content has dropped and the company continues to investigate ways to cut this further. It is watching developments of solvent inks based on corn oil derivatives as a future possibility.

At the same time, Elanders Hindson is cutting back on isopropyl alcohol use. This is the most harmful solvent used in litho printing as it is a volatile organic compound which evaporates easily at relatively low temperatures and then reacts to create ozone which causes skin and throat irritations. In the last year the company has tried different IPA substitutes and has significantly reduced IPA use. Its figures show a drop of 74% in VOC emissions and a reduction of 50% in solvent use per tonne of paper.

The company has achieved registration under FSC to accompany its ISO 14001 certificate. This was first awarded in 1998, before Elanders bought the company indicating a long-standing commitment to environmental best practice. The FSC, awarded to papers that have been sourced from well managed sustainable forests, is proof that the paper used has an audit trail that the end customer can follow directly to the producer and the forest that provided the timber. For the printer it means that such paper has to be segregated and cannot be mixed with standard sheets, in order to keep the audit trail intact.

Any waste that the production process generates – and some is inevitable – is carefully managed. Last year the company managed to find uses for 80% of waste and is on the lookout to increase this percentage. Waste is sorted into 15 different categories, 13 of which are passed to selected companies to manage and where possible reuse. Material that is waste to Elanders Hindson becomes street signs, new containers or at worst fuel to generate more power. This has both cut the amount of money the company might have had to spend on landfill taxes, and last year returned £45,000 to the company from the waste management companies.

“Holding accreditations such as the quality standard ISO 14001 and either Forest Stewardship Council chain of custody or the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification is now a de facto among the leading print companies”. Kevin Rogers

This is proof that sound environmental practice is also sound business practice both internally and also externally as clients are looking to work with companies that have a sound environmental background. To secure this many are prepared to pay a little more rather than risk the damage to their brand that working with noncompliant companies might entail.

“It is not enough for a print company to claim to ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’; clients demand proof of robust environmental management,” says business development director Kevin Rogers. “Holding accreditations such as the quality standard ISO 14001 and either Forest Stewardship Council chain of custody or the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification is now a de facto among the leading print companies, while the European initiative, the Eco Management Audit System of Accreditation continues to gain support and is likely to become the recognised gold standard of green credentials in the near future.”

Elanders is certainly looking at this as its next step. It already has one answer for a certain group of customers. The company is a member of the International Printers Network, a confederation of companies who trust each other and who can print on each other’s behalf for customers wanting print produced in a different country. This has an immediate impact in cutting back on transport because print is produced close to the point of need and it is only a digital file that is sent across thousands of miles rather than boxes of print.

Within its own organisation Elanders can do this as plants are situated close to the factories producing the goods that need the user manuals it is printing.

It is both sound business practice and good for the environment. In turn it is something that all print companies need to be aware of and considering. The whole environmental issue is only going to become more important, which Elanders Hindson points out in its useful environmental brochure: “It’s an element of business that no responsible printer can or should be neglecting.”