Warners: green progress is constant

Lincolnshire printer Warners (Midland) Plc is continually stepping up its environmental performance, with Chain of Custody for FSC and PEFC next on its agenda.

There’s little to suggest the presence of a £30 million turnover printing concern as you drive through the residential area of the Lincolnshire town of Bourne, but that’s where you will find Warners (Midland) Plc, which prints more than 400 magazine titles, occupying a 200-year old building that used to house a malting operation, and another new building, purpose built for Warners, next door.

Location is important: Warners’ environmental outlook owes much to its position in the town, and the need to be a good neighbour is always a factor in making decisions on improvements to the plant.

The printer already has the ISO 14001 environmental certification, but facilities co-ordinator Kevin Day, who has responsibility for Warners’ green credentials, explains that achieving that is just the beginning of a drive towards continual environmental improvement.

“To that end, we are constantly assessing environmental targets and objectives,” says Day. “We have been looking at on-site micro generation, using photovoltaics (which convert light from the sun into electricity), but this site is not practical for it. It’s just not feasible, because the pay back would take many years. We’ve also looked at having our own turbine, but we’ve rejected that on the grounds that we are in the middle of a residential area. We would have to go through a planning process and we would have encountered a lot of objections from residents. We’re also next to the town’s only park.”

Day has lived in Bourne all his life, so the desire to protect the local area is certainly a genuine one. It has been possible to find other ways to improve the company’s environmental performance though, despite these abortive ideas. Perhaps the most high profile of these is Warners’ steps towards both FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification through the certification body BM TRADA. This has been initiated in part because in recent times more web reel paper grades have become FSC or PEFC accredited.

Day confirms that there has also been an increasing push from clients asking about papers from certified sources. “Yes, it has really been pushed on by our customers. Many of them are more interested in FSC and PEFC than ISO 14001, and it is far harder to achieve the ISO standard than Chain of Custody. Many of the measures are already in place for FSC and PEFC through ISO 14001. We’ve just got to tinker with our audit trail, but I don’t foresee any problems in achieving that certification.”

Warners expects to go through the auditing process for Chain of Custody later this year, and intends to then take the message out to more clients. The first stage in that will be internal education though, with Howard Smith Paper Group having been enrolled to present to Warners’ sales and marketing teams on FSC and PEFC papers and what the implications of using them are, so that clients’ questions can be more quickly and accurately answered.

Another initiative that has been consuming Day’s time has seen a reduction in the tonnage of waste that Warners sends to landfill. “On October 30th the law changes and commercial premises cannot send to landfill things like plastic cups and aluminium cans,” explains Day. “All of that will have to be treated, which means we have to segregate more. Ten years ago, when we were a lot smaller than we are now, we used to send between 30 and 40 tonnes to landfill weekly.

“We now send less than seven tonnes every six weeks to landfill. I can see the waste going to landfill coming down to about three tonnes. We want to get to zero and I don’t think we are too far away from that now. The only real thing that will give us a problem is food waste. We have three shifts, operating more or less 24/7, and people have to eat. That’s what will be going into landfill. We’re looking at composting but a lot of the waste you cannot compost.”

Another aspect that Day is continually working on reducing is the energy that Warners consumes, and a raft of measures have succeeded in so far meeting the targets set for the company by the Government’s Climate Change Levy. At one end of the scale, office lighting and heating arrangements have been made more energyefficient; at the other end, Warners’ new building, which houses its newest web press, a MAN Roland Lithoman 32-page machine (itself an energy-efficient press, says Day), is described as “self-heating”. Partly this is due to the flooring, which Day says maintains a particular ambient temperature in the room.

Additionally, at one end of the new building Warners has installed a regenerative thermal oxydiser (RTO) unit, which pipes away the harmful gases, such as VOCs (volatile organic compounds), created in the printing process and uses those gases themselves as fuel to burn the gases away.

“It uses very little natural gas as fuel, and what is left is sent into the atmosphere as near clean air. With VOCs we are not allowed to send more than 50 milligrammes per normal metre cubed into the atmosphere, and using the RTO we send less than 10 milligrammes per normal metre cubed,” says Day. Operating the RTO also generates heat and this can be used to heat the building if necessary in the winter months, he adds.

Day considers that most of the big steps to reducing energy output have already been made at Warners, saying that “there are still things we can do, but it is getting harder and harder”. He is confident of making the company’s 2008 target of reducing energy consumption by 12% against the 1997 baseline, set by the Climate Change Levy, but two years on from that, the 2010 target of 16% against the baseline could be more difficult.

“That will be quite a tough target, but I think we can hit it. We’ve got to change the way we operate though and that will require a big push on awareness – things like getting people to switch printing machines off after use. So I think we will achieve the target through simpler things, rather than with one big technological hit. We’ve done all of those, so I’m not sure there’s much more we can do,” says Day.

Inks and plates could be future targets for improving Warners environmental performance also, Day reports. Warners has recently switched its ink supplier to start using heatset inks with 25% solvent content, compared to 30% in the previous inks. However, there is no viable alternative to solvent based heatset inks as yet, he says.

"We are constantly assessing environmental targets and objectives." Kevin Day

Likewise with printing plates, the view is that processless technology is still in its infancy and is not suitable for Warners yet. “We look for quick turnaround, short run web printing – there’s not many of us around – so we have to keep make-readies as fast as possible. Our web presses use about 15,000 plates per month, and we don’t think that processless is capable of dealing with that amount at this moment in time. As it improves we are always investing in new technology and I would think that yes, one day we will go down that route.”

In any case, Warners already recycles used plates and breaks down the chemicals used in processing to neutralise the harmful substances at source through the use of a system from manufacturer Remondis called Recomasys. It all adds up to a comprehensive programme of environmental measures that Day is driving through at Warners, and with ISO 14001 certification already gained, and FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody to come before the end of the year, the improvements will continue to be made.