The Print and Packaging Forum is pleased to announce that it will be participating in a resource efficiency programme funded under the EPA’s Green Business Initiative. The programme, which is confidential to all participating companies, will provide free resource efficiency assessments and advice to members of the Print and Packaging Forum.
Background Information
The EPA funded Greenbusiness Initiative carried out several Resource Efficiency Assessments over the past few years in the Print and Packaging sector, in which significant savings were identified. The sector’s Print and Packaging Forum will progress with a sector specific resource efficiency programme.
Forum Promotes Companies to Join the Programme
Five businesses have been recruited to the programme to date.
Programme offering:
1. Resource Efficiency Assessments
The Resource Efficiency Assessments will generally take one day on site, during which one or two site assessors will visit the operations, accompanied by a site or process manager. Following the site visit a confidential, detailed resource efficiency report will be issued within 4 weeks to the company (this time period allows us to follow up any outstanding information requests). The report will set out any suggestions on how savings can be made to operational overheads, focussing on waste prevention, water and energy savings, possibly through process or operational changes, improved waste minimisation and materials handling. Businesses will receive ‘how to’ information and the cost-benefit basis for a business case, which are critical factors in making things actually happen. In effect each company will get up to 4 days free consulting time, to help save company costs.
2. Procurement / Supply Chain Greening
We encourage companies to also look at resource efficiency in their supply chain, over and above their own in-house operations.
We aim to support the most committed businesses on the programme with a small element of green procurement work. This will look at how procurement choices can be made that minimise waste, packaging, or reduce the overall energy needed in supply and goods delivery. We would aim to send a questionnaire on resource efficiency practices to your suppliers, and development of procedures to embed green procurement into company operations.
3. Benchmarking Survey
We will compile data from the Print & Pack industries, and existing data available in the literature and held directly by our company, to start establishing a basis for benchmarking resource use (materials, waste, water and energy) by production type and normalised against throughput. We will increase the reliability of this data, to make it most useful to the Print & Pack Forum, by undertaking e-mail / web surveys of the 200 forum members. By participating in the survey, members will assist in establishing statistically sound information of sector wide importance for benchmark data, broken down by printing type.
4. Good Practice Guide
The funded programme also aims to develop a Print and Packaging good practice guide. To achieve this, it would be good if a wider cross section of print & pack companies participate, to inform the guidance development. Best Practice Guides are an important mechanism in encouraging businesses to engage with the resource efficiency agenda.
The best practice guide will contain relevant short case studies and photographs and would be based on the good practice identified from our existing sector knowledge and the current programme participants. Summary benchmark data (from the survey work) will be incorporated into the relevant sections with further data available in the spreadsheet online.
The information will be kept aggregated and/or otherwise anonymised and will not include any commercial or confidential information unless this is approved by the companies in question, e.g. for the case studies.
The intention is that the best practice guide would be web published on the greenbusiness website www.greenbusiness.ie with the approval of the Print and Pack Forum, to assist and inspire members and other Irish printers.
5. Training Workshop
A resource efficiency/ cost savings training workshop for interested Forum members will be organised to disseminate the good practice findings and benchmarking data.
This will be an interactive half day workshop with exercises and case studies. Preferably there will be presentations from site managers who have already benefitted from our resource efficiency advice, and who can relate their own experiences in improving their resource efficiency and making cost savings due to a wide range of improvement measures undertaken. The workshop will be advertised in Spring 2012 through the Print & Pack Forum.
Contact:
The Print and Packaging Forum is the main stakeholder of this programme, and should be your first port of call if you are interested in participating, and receiving a free assessment, or have any other questions about the programme.
The Resource Efficiency Assessments and other elements of the programme will be carried out by an experienced team from greenbusiness.ie.
