As it strives to become more sustainable, Freudenberg is focusing on shrinking its ecological footprint while enabling its customers to do the same – with the help of innovative Freudenberg products and services (handprint). The company’s environmental balance sheet also improves when it turns to sustainable suppliers, for example, for the printing of this employee magazine and the customer magazine “ESSENTIAL.”
Can print media be produced sustainably? To Matthias Abt, CEO of ABT Mediengruppe in Weinheim and a supplier to Freudenberg Sealing Technologies (FST), the answer is an unambiguous “yes.” A company brochure highlights ABT’s pursuit of sustainability. Naturally, it is printed on certified recycling paper. On the back, the phrase “produced with green electricity” is printed in a small typeface at the lower right. Once you open the brochure, you find references to a range of topics: EMAS, the premium environmental management system; climate-neutral printing; green electricity generated from the company’s photovoltaic system; natural eco-inks, and chemical-free printing plates, which ABT uses to print FST’s magazine on an offset press.
An insert lists the environmental seals and certifications that the owner-operated family company has earned. Two of them – FSC and PEFC – document responsible, sustainable forest management, including re-cultivation and reforesting of woodlands. “Wood is a renewable and therefore sustainable raw material. The wood for the paper that we use comes from sustainable, and preferably regional, forest management,” Abt said. “We are exclusively using certified paper.”
ABT is a cross-media company, at home in both the digital and printing worlds. That puts it in a good position to judge the advantages and disadvantages of specific formats. “The touch and feel of print media such as ‘Sealing World’ or ‘ESSENTIAL’ convey seriousness and importance. Printed media also communicate an appreciation of your readers. When you read information on paper, you generally retain it better. Print acts on the mind and you hold onto the information. Readers generally trust printed information more as well,” Abt said. But he stressed the unbeatable speed, timeliness and flexibility of digital publishing. “By contrast, you wouldn’t print price lists anymore. They would usually be out-of-date by the time of delivery,” he said.
Cross-media Is Ideal
But do printed media really offer state-of-the-art sustainability? Or to put it another way: Which is more sustainable, an electronic newspaper or a printed version? As is so often the case, there is no single answer. Much depends on the details. What kind of paper is the material printed on? How extensive is the use of energy and materials during printing, distribution and the shipment of the papers? How many people read a single copy of the publication? The more readers per copy, the more sustainable it is. Once one copy of a newspaper is printed, it can be read emission-free by any number of persons over any length of time.
In turn, how much electricity does the digital end-device “consume” when you read an online newspaper? A computer needs much more energy than a mobile reader. What raw materials were consumed to make the device? Wood is a renewable resource, and its use in the production of paper is fundamentally more sustainable than the use of noble metals in electronic devices. These metals are finite resources. Sawmill scrap and wood from the thinning of otherwise unusable trees can be used to make paper. Furthermore, paper can be recycled up to seven times. How much time do you spend reading online? Unlike a printed newspaper, the stresses on the environment rise as the duration of an online session increases. In addition, the amount of electronic scrap and the recycling rate for smartphones, tablets, notebooks and other devices also have to flow onto the “digital eco-balance sheet.”
So, it makes sense to be at home in both worlds. A customized symbiosis of digital and analogue media is a promising way to reach a particular target group and to communicate sustainably. A mix of print and online media tailored to the content, to users and to sustainability issues makes the difference. It also pays to work with printing and media companies that embrace sustainability.
Green Electricity
There are 3,408 solar panels generating green electricity at the new headquarters of the Vomela Commercial Group. The corporate group owns Tepel Brothers Printing, which prints Sealing World and other literature for Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies in the United States. The printer also uses FSC-certified paper. Each year, several hundred tons of discarded paper go back to the paper mill for recycling. Tepel Brothers uses solvent-free inks for printing. They release no volatile organic compounds (VOC) or air pollution. In the printing process, the inks are dried under ultraviolet light.
At Tepel Brothers, stable, efficient production processes with short changeover times are reducing the demand for energy and the amount of scrap, in this case, paper waste. In the printing industry, paper waste includes trimmings and damaged or otherwise unusable defective sheets. The less paper waste generated during press set-ups, for example, the better.
