Carbon is the currency of the moment. But instead of spending it, the industry is trying to save it. As energy costs spiral out of control, an optimised carbon footprint becomes an all-round winner - saving both the environment and hard cash. And to help printers in their battle to minimise their carbon emissions, the BPIF has developed a carbon calculator, based on the soon-to-be-launched PAS 2050 specification from the British Standards Institute. PAS 2050 is a method for measuring the "embodied" greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from goods and services. Originally dreamed up by the Carbon Trust and Defra, the publicly-available specification is due for launch in September/October.

　　Calculation method

　　The BPIF has been involved since the draft specification’s first consultation period in October 2007 when Dale Wallis, the Federation’s northern managing director, formed a working group of interested printers and green printing experts including the Pureprint Group, Trinity Mirror and the Greenpeace/Friends of the Earth print buyer David Shorto.

　　Based on the group’s work on the draft specification, the BPIF formulated its carbon calculation method, and is only waiting now for the launch of PAS 2050 to begin using it in earnest.

　　In part, the BPIF’s calculator is a response to other initiatives currently being touted to printers. Wallis cites the example of The Carbon Neutral Company (CNC), a private firm rumoured to have charged a UK printer several thousand pounds to calculate its factory’s carbon footprint based on a method that failed to take into account more than a small part of the scope and lifecycle of the factory and its raw materials.

　　CNC’s footprinting methods were challenged on Channel 4’s current affairs programme Dispatches in July last year, but as Wallis says, without a commonly-accepted benchmark, CNC was doing nothing wrong. But the incident made us step up our own efforts to ask the government for an accepted carbon footprinting benchmark, he says, to stop the proliferation of standards and methods that were beginning to spring up.

　　As a manufacturing industry – and an industry often, and largely mistakenly, perceived by the public to be a major polluter – the print industry has been keen to determine and then reduce its carbon footprint for some time now. More and more, we’re seeing our members asked to provide evidence of their carbon footprint at first-tender stage, Wallis says. In addition, he points out, a carbon footprint, which is really just a sophisticated audit with the outcome measured in units of carbon rather than, as we’re more used to, cost or time is the start of an opportunity for printers to optimise their process and reduce costs.

　　The BPIF’s new calculator can be used to determine the carbon footprint of a printed product or a manufacturing site. So printers can use it to tell new clients what the carbon footprint of their product will be, if printed at their site, Wallis says. He identifies this as a big weapon for book printers – if publishers are interested in the environmental aspects of their printing, this is one of the few things that K book printers have on their side against Far East production, for example.

　　Footprinting involves breaking down a carbon product (a manufacturing site or a printed product) into five boundaries. The manufacture of the paper, distribution of paper, the print site itself (including energy use, vehicle use, internal transportation, associated business miles, equipment energy use and other consumables used in the print process), waste management, and retail, which considers the transportation to the retail site and the energy use in-store.

　　The PAS 2050 standard also works on the basis of carbon debits and credits. Wallis explains: Debits are typically for raw materials used, so every tonne of paper you ship in is a debit. But you get credits for any recycling you do, so if you recycle a tonne of paper you can set that against the carbon debit of buying the stuff in the first place. The BPIF worked with leading print industry waste collection experts J&G Environmental to determine the footprint of those services.

　　Accurate data

　　However, Wallis is keen to stress that the calculator will not allow carbon offsetting while the analysis period is ongoing: If you footprint your site, you choose a six- or 12-month period to carry out those measurements. If you offset any carbon while you’re carrying that out, it shifts the goalposts. Once you’ve finished, you can choose to offset if you want. The idea is to compel you to minimise or eliminate carbon as part of the process, he explains, and then when you’ve eliminated what you can and minimised what you can’t, then you can look at offsetting, which ought to be a final resort.

　　Working with the PAS 2050 framework, the BPIF calculator hopes to achieve what companies such as CNC appear not to have: the input of accurate carbon footprinting data on the raw material side. The industry body will use its status to work with consumables manufacturers on this issue. Most crucial of these consumables is paper: initial research shows that paper is far and away the biggest carbon element in the overall footprint of any printed product. If the BPIF can succeed in this, it will produce the industry’s most sophisticated and accurate carbon calculator yet.

　　It’s not perfect, Wallis says, and it will need tweaking. He anticipates that consultants and other private companies will also use PAS 2050 to develop their own methodologies that will co-exist with the BPIF’s.

　　One example of a scheme already under construction is from the Carbon Trust itself. The Trust is to introduce a product labelling scheme that indicates the amount of carbon used in the manufacture of the product – early beta-testers include Trinity Mirror, which has tallied an average of 250 grammes of carbon in the average newspaper.

　　Companies that apply for the carbon label will use the Carbon Trust’s method to calculate a product’s footprint, and once given the go-ahead to use the label, must commit to reducing that footprint on a two-year cycle: if the footprint isn’t reduced, the product loses the right to use the label.

　　The BPIF’s carbon calculator is free of charge to the Federation’s Platinum-level members, and costs £595 to anyone else. Although it doesn’t sound expensive, it could eventually mount up to a significant cost to other printers, because each time one of the parameters of a product or a site changes, the footprint must be recalculated – and that could be as little as changing the main ink product, or changing the company fleets for diesel-engined models.

　　For once, it seems, the methodology is within the reach of even the smallest printer – as long as they can make the commitment to maintain supplies over the analysis period. We have developed this for everyone, says Wallis, because while it’s a significant tool for medium-sized printers upwards, it’s still a great opportunity for the entire industry to get a handle on their environmental activities.

 

[时间：2008-09-04  作者：Karen Charlesworth  来源：互联网|#]