Royle Corporate Print ticks the boxes off

Royle Corporate Print has worked steadily through the quality and environmental certifications, with carbon neutral being the latest badge it’s entitled to wear.

As a specialist in printing high quality corporate communications, with a consequent focus on annual report & accounts work, Royle Corporate Print has been ideally placed to gauge the rising importance of the environment within the corporate world. It’s an insight that has allowed it to have the necessary environmental accreditations ready to hand, often in advance of their importance to clients.

The latest example of this is the issue of carbon neutrality: it is more and more required by clients, and Royle is there already, having been certified as a carbon neutral printer in May 2007. “We brought in The Carbon Neutral Company, who in conjunction with the University of Edinburgh, helped guide us through the whole process to achieve carbon neutral status,” says Royle’s joint managing director Gary Mellish. “From the substantial amount of information we were required to submit The Carbon Neutral Company assessed our carbon footprint and we are offsetting that by investing in an Indian wind farm project.”

Carbon neutrality comes with an implicit commitment to make continual improvements to reduce the size of the carbon footprint, and Royle is currently installing energy efficient lighting throughout its operations, which includes the sizeable production facility in Croydon, as well as training its staff on more basic, energy-efficient housekeeping issues.

Attaining carbon neutral status is only the latest certificate to roll off Royle Corporate Print’s production line though. As long ago as 1991 it was awarded the ISO 9001 quality management certificate, and this was helpful in smoothing the path for Royle’s ISO 14001 environmental certification, which was rubber-stamped in February 2003. Royle gained its FSC Chain of Custody mark in March 2006.

These systems are managed by works director Dave Pilbeam, who is quick to point out the importance of the manufacturing team buying into the “COAR” ethos – Commitment, Ownership, Awareness and Responsibility all of which enable the smooth operation of these systems.

“The disciplines for the quality management system have been in place for quite some time and so the drive to become ISO 14001 accredited was reasonably straight-forward. Culturally, the mindset was already there within the company,” Mellish’s fellow MD, Michael Yorke reports.

It’s clear that the requirements of the corporate reporting market have been a significant driver in Royle’s progress with regard to environmental accreditations. The report and accounts is, after all, a corporate organisation’s flagship piece of print, and nowhere in its marketing and corporate communications strategy is it more important to present a clean, green bill of health. Report and accounts and corporate social responsibility reports account for around 70% of Royle’s sales, and it produces these key documents for a wide range of blue chip organisations, such as the BBC and Marks & Spencer – organisations that are not afraid to take the lead environmentally themselves.

“We would consider ourselves to be amongst the environmental leaders in UK print, and a lot of our clients also share that belief,” comments Mellish. “It has changed so quickly. The BBC and Marks & Spencer made carbon neutral status a pre-requisite. We would not have become involved in their projects without the advances we have made on the environment. When we make recommendations to clients who have not considered the environmental impact of their communications the reactions can be quite varied – some don’t consider it to be an issue, but these are becoming an increasing minority, while others embrace the concept and share our belief in making changes to the process for a more responsible environmental outcome.”

Such is the range and quality of recycled and other eco-friendly materials available to the printing process now, that Yorke adds that any corporate client specifying green will continue to receive a high quality printed product. Royle enjoys the process of advising clients on the most suitable materials. Paper suppliers market their products in different ways, which can be confusing for specifiers. Royle Corporate Print seized the initiative and produced a specifiers’ handbook, as part of its ongoing commitment to ISO 14001, which included all the environmentally-friendly coated and uncoated papers available. The handbook shows printed and plain samples of each substrate, with standardised information about each substrate. It was first produced in 2006 and continues to be a valuable tool.

What is undeniable is that, increasingly, major brands are looking to use FSC (or equivalent) or recycled paper stocks for their corporate documents, and Royle takes it upon itself to ensure the client is aware of all the options available to them to minimise the publication’s environmental impact.

“We take the environmental message to every project,” says Yorke. “We’re always willing to work with clients to update the specification of their job to a more environmentally responsible basis. Nevertheless, the whole environmental principle has to run side by side with running a profitable business.”

Better environmental practice pervades Royle’s print site in Croydon, which it shares with several other divisions of its parent group, the French-owned CPI. Apart from a few highly specialized finishing processes, this site can handle every part of the supply chain. There is a Flint Group Ink laboratory on-site producing inks for Royle’s presses, many of which are now vegetable-based, while coatings are water-based. Eighty percent of Royle’s blanket and roller wash is recycled through an Ecoclean system purchased from Technotrans.

“The environmental impact of any new technology, including energy consumption will become an increasingly important factor on any new investment in the future,” adds Mellish. Having made several significant strides with carbon neutral, ISO 14001 and FSC in the last 18 months, Royle is pausing to assess its progress before moving the environmental story along. EMAS (Eco-Management and Audit Scheme), which recognises companies that go beyond minimum legal compliance with continuous improvement, could be the next chapter.

And a rarely considered side effect of improved environmental performance is the benefits that a company’s staff experience in their personal wellbeing and their working lives – reduced usage of hazardous chemicals being one of these. At Royle, there has been a common understanding that what the company is trying to achieve environmentally is good for all.

Says Yorke: “It has become routine for the staff. The underlying benefit of achieving the environmental accreditations is that they have a cleaner environment to work in. They understand what it is we are doing day in, day out in terms of printing corporate communications, and the dynamics of what’s important to our clients. We have clients on the factory floor almost every project, so the staff are always interfacing with them.”

In a business climate where shareholders want to be assured of the eco-friendly credentials of the print issued in their name, Royle’s heritage as a high quality corporate communications printer is as important as its burgeoning reputation for responsible, sustainable print. Crucially, in today’s market, neither aspect ever compromises the other.

The concern now is the availability of sufficient raw material to recycle and sufficient recycling capacity to sustain the demand for quality recycled paper.

Case Study

There are times when the environmental message that Royle Corporate Print is committed to falls exactly in line with the direction a corporate client is moving in. One such client, a FTSE Top 100 company, had established a Corporate & Social Responsibility committee, with a main board director chairing it and reporting its progress back to the main board, just at the time when Royle, who had worked with the client for three years previously, started the environmental debate with them.

“We approached the client for a move to a quality, partrecycled paper at a very early stage, jointly with the designer, when approved visuals were presented for assessment of any production issues,” says Michael Yorke.

“In preparation for this approach, we had prepared a detailed summary of costs, comparing the virgin quality they were currently using with a range of potentially suitable partrecycled alternatives, detailing their environmental credentials and whether or not they had FSC chain of custody.”

From the list Royle had identified a suitable quality paper and had produced scatter proofs of suitable imagery to present at the meeting, with costs. While it was the client’s view that it was the right time to go down the environmental road with their annual report and annual review, they looked to Royle for the necessary assurances on quality reproduction of the approved imagery, which was a great deal more adventurous in places than the previous year.

Suitable imprint copy which detailed fully the environmental credentials, in line with the CSR policy and to give the relevant environmental message to shareholders, was also agreed.

Following a comprehensive scatter proofing exercise with the approved imagery for the 2006 reports, the entire project was successfully completed to a very tight schedule which included working through the Easter weekend. The resulting annual report now uses 50% recycled paper, the inks are soya based, the coatings are water based, the printer and paper mill are both ISO 14001 accredited, and the printer is FSC accredited and Carbon Neutral.

The client has now added these details to its CSR programme of disciplines and they feature on its CSR reports, which are, ironically, not printed, but appear only online.