Environmental compliance issues spring up across the industry as busy printers juggle the latest regulations with the old, and while regular business demands continue. Matters of the environment in all sectors play catch-up with established consumptive growth, and rarely win the proper attention.

Some certifications are more popular than others, and some regulations are technically passé. The environmental printing trendsetters remain active behind the scenes, where important work gets done. John Piggott, founder and president of EcoSafe and recipient of a bronze Environmental Printing Award this year, promotes Pollution Prevention (P2) over waste management, reduction over handling. 

Matt Richardson: Are chemicals getting worse or better with new processes in printing?

John Piggott: CTP chemistry is far worse than photographic chemistry. It’s extremely corrosive, and it contains the extraction of the elements ethyl acetate, phosphorous, potassium or sodium hydroquinone – it depends on the process. There’s a European company in all this that produces a chemistry that is filthy. It’s black, soupy stuff going down the drain. And just below that is a Japanese company whose process contains the dye Blue 007 extracted from the plate. 

A lot of people don’t realize this; they say, ‘Ah, it’s aqueous plate chemistry – great.’ The reaction in processing the plate creates a whole different ball game, because it extracts the nasty from the plates, you get chemical reactions, and what you put down the drain is not that which comes from the bottle. Now, if you’re going to use a waterless process, that’s different. But CTP chemistry is nasty stuff. The chemistry for the presses is becoming better; it’s the prepress that’s the nasty one now.

Why is it better for a printer to handle waste on-site, rather than have a third-party come and take it?
Treating on-site, eliminating the hazardous element from the chemical in the first place, means if you follow Pollution Prevention (P2) principles to the letter, you wouldn’t have the waste in the first place. You’d find what’s called an alternate. Or you’d reduce it. First thing to do is to say, ‘I have this pollutant, it’s hazardous to my people and hazardous to the environment; I don’t like it. Suppliers, tell me what else you’ve got.’ Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you’re forced to use something that has the minimum amount of problems, but you still have pollutants. So here we have a situation where pollution prevention changes to waste management. 

If you take a solvent for instance, and you buy a blanket wash, recapture the solvent, pass it through a solvent recovery process distillation unit, and capture the clean solvent for reuse, you gain a few things: first of all, assuming you’ve recovered 80 percent, you’ve reduced the cost of your product purchases by 80 percent. The next thing you save is what you’d pay somebody to haul it off-site, which could be from $165 to $200 a drum. The third thing is that you don’t have to manifest it, you don’t have to register it with the government, because all hazardous waste hauled off-site has to have a waste manifest, you have to register that waste with the government, you have to pay the government at the rate of $50 every time you ship it off, and you have to pay to register each year.

So why are people doing it?
They do that because it’s the easiest thing to do. They get a waste haulage company coming in, they’re very good people, friends of mine. They say they’ll handle all the paperwork for you and you just have to write the check at the end of the month. But you’re liable for it too. You have to keep those manifest copies on site for two years. An inspector will come in to inspect them, and if you haven’t filed them properly you’ll be charged. 

[With P2] you’re eradicating liability, you’re eradicating costs, and you’re saving yourself a whole bunch of money. Plus, you have to account for all the VOCs you purchase; this is how you document it with the NPRI [National Pollutant Release Inventory] and Regulation 127, every year you have to report the VOC emissions. The government asks you to do a mass balance. That’s garbage in, garbage out. If you haven’t purchased VOCs in the first place, you don’t have to report it. There are layer after layer of benefits from P2. And this is true P2 also; it’s not waste management. 

Where does the Sewer-Use Bylaw come in?
The Sewer-Use Bylaw is probably the strongest – some people would say most draconian bylaw. The bylaw itself is modeled after the one in New Jersey, and in my opinion I think it’s terrific because it involved the coming together of organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the Ministry of the Environment. [Former Toronto mayor] Mel Lastman drove this through because he wanted to eliminate persistent pollutants from the sewer sludge so that they could process it into useable fertilizer. You can’t throw toxic compound onto farm fields. There was also a concern about hormone copycats or endocrine disruptors that the WWF wanted out of there because they were causing terrible damage to endangered species, et cetera. There’s a big history to this. Most of this stuff has a strong background. 

Are most printing companies meeting their Sewer-Use Bylaw responsibilities?

To my knowledge and experience, I would say 20 percent are meeting the bylaw regulations. They are the proactive ones, the good guys. Those who are polluting are not meeting compliance, and it’s often through ignorance; it’s not intentional. Now, people are unaware that printers are under the gun; they have a job to do, to find clients, to keep clients, to get the production out as fast as possible, to meet deadlines and all that. Compliance is an area that is becoming more prevalent, but has sadly been overlooked because at best, it’s thought of as part of the cost of doing business, rather than helping the bottom line. 

Now, with good waste management you reduce your costs. That point needs pushing. It could be the difference between a company going under and staying in business. I’ve seen it in 12 years of doing this. I started beating my chest when I was the environmental director for Fuji Graphics, and people would say, ‘I’ll worry about it when the fish swim upside-down in the river.’ It has changed a lot. 

What’s the worst environmental scene you’ve recently seen in a printing company?

Waste fountain solution poured down a toilet. Daily. It was a medium-sized company, between 50 and 80 employees.

What’s the worst printing process for releasing VOCs?

Flexographic or gravure. They use high solvent-based inks. Flexographic is the process by which we print on plastic, which has no absorption, therefore it has to rely on evaporation of solvents to dry. Sheetfed can rely on absorption, aerial oxidation and chemical reaction by cobalt dryers.

Must presses be made with environmental efficiencies in mind?

Yeah. You wouldn’t believe what they have to go through in Europe to meet standards, or in Japan. When they install something, they can’t put a company out of compliance. There’s also a regulation we have, Regulation 851, section 7, that says any time a new piece of equipment is installed, or refurbished or moved or whatever, the Pre-Start Health and Safety Review has to take place, and that’s the law. People don’t recognize that until someone calls from the government and asks if they’ve done it. 

How can we reconcile the differences in certification systems like FSC, ISO and EcoLogo?
ISO 14001 is definitely the most holistic model, and the one most based upon continual improvement. It’s based upon the model that has made Japan’s auto industry so successful. ISO 14001 is a much more elegant standard than ISO 9001, which is the quality standard. 
EcoLogo needs to be updated; it’s got huge sections in there about film production and fixes and developers, things that are just not used anymore. I was on the technical committee, the consultant board that produced the standard and it was developed back in ’93. I haven’t seen any changes since. 

FSC certification requires a review of your inventory management system and your document control system. People think you just get FSC certified like EcoLogo – if you use recycled paper, you can put these three doves on it, and that doesn’t exist anymore. EcoLogo now, even though it’s out of date, you still have to meet process-specific requirements. 

So ISO 14001 is definitely the biggest bang for your buck because it’s predicated by the concept of helping companies make money. There’s nothing in it that hurts a company. And it will force a company, if they really buy into this, to be efficient and reduce their costs. If they’re doing it just to get a banner on the wall, then it’s a waste of everybody’s time and money. 

You were on the CPIA sustainability committee when it was created, what progress has been made since then?

You’re talking about when we created a memorandum of understanding between the federal and provincial governments and the printing industry. That was four years of committee work that ended up in a program called CleanPrint. That’s what we produced. The committee that we worked on has worked on a lot of great stuff. I think it was an opportunity that was founded in good faith, but lost impetus, and therefore we now require more regulations and stronger regulations, because the carrot didn’t work, and now they’ve got to use the stick.  

There is a silver lining; there are organizations like OCETA [Ontario Centre for Environmental Technology Advancement] that still offer a very big carrot. They put their money where their mouth is. The Toronto Sustainability P2 assessment is basically a super version of CleanPrint. CleanPrint is like EcoLogo, and it came out at about the same time, and it’s just as dated. It was a good idea that was left to stagnate. The P2 Assessment is only in the Greater Toronto Area; CleanPrint was supposed to be national. It’s handled very well nationally by the other Printing Industry Associations.

Where does the current sewer bylaw stop or fail? Why would there be a new one coming?

From what I understand from discussions with my contacts, there are elements of water quality that need to be controlled. We’re still going to use ink, we’re still getting copper, and we’re still getting aluminium and all kinds of stuff in our drinking water. 

What happens is that, as we progress, the equipment we utilize to investigate becomes more and more accurate. It’s like CSI: Sherlock Holmes would’ve dropped dead with jealousy if he could’ve had half of what CSI has to investigate with. We’re finding more stuff because we’ve got better equipment to find it. 

I keep hearing that printing is a sunset industry. It’s not. It’s an evolving industry. And part of the evolution is always the challenge of change. This is just another challenge that our industry can meet, exceed and benefit from.