Sydney printing company achieves sustainability gold

Sydney printing company Focus Press started out in 1994 with only four people, but has since grown to 100 people at two locations. Now it has another achievement to be proud of - becoming one of the few printing companies that can claim to be truly environmentally sustainable. This achievement in sustainability leadership has been recognised by the NSW Government, with Focus Press being awarded with Gold Partner status in the Sustainability Advantage program of the Department of Environment, Climate Change & Water (DECCW), in January 2011.

Focus Press has been in the Sustainability Advantage program since 2007, and achieved Bronze and Silver recognition in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

CEO David Fuller has been working towards making the company more sustainable since 2001, but by entering the Sustainability Advantage program Focus Press was able to gain the skills and the knowledge needed to make significant changes.

“Initially, DECCW came out and performed a Sustainability Management Diagnostic, and then over the next few years we undertook projects based on a series of Sustainability Advantage modules,” said Louise Pastro, Sustainability Manager. They completed the Resource Efficiency, Supply Chain and KPI modules, and they also completed a Climate Change module equivalency with a private consultant. “In each module we learned about what we needed to do to become more sustainable in that particular area of our business. DECCW tailored each module to the specifics of our business, providing a focused, hands-on approach that was relevant to our manufacturing operations.”

By the time Focus Press achieved Silver recognition it had most of the physical operational changes in place to achieve sustainability. Achieving Gold recognition now meant changing the company culture.

“The biggest thing for us about Gold was really making changes at the management level of the company and in the company culture,” said Pastro.

“We took all our sales staff off-site and taught them about sustainability, the new measures we had incorporated into our business and how to communicate these to clients, as well as how they have benefitted our business. We made sure that we included sustainability in our marketing plan and we looked at our strategic business plan to make sure that it included further sustainability goals - such as producing a sustainability report by the end of the year, or to further reduce energy consumption by 10%. We wanted to make sure that our commitment to sustainability was firmly embedded in the core of our company.”

Some organisations might still see sustainability as something that would place an extra load on their business, but not Focus Press.

“Achieving sustainability has helped our business economically, by helping us to save on energy consumption and reduce our landfill,” explains Pastro. “But it has also provided an important benefit in the way the company culture and the way we present ourselves has changed - our sustainability achievements have become a real point of difference for us in the printing market.”

In addition to the management, behavioural and business changes that helped them achieve Gold Partner status, some of the physical measures that Focus Press has taken in its drive to sustainability have included replacing toxic petroleum-based inks with vegetable-based inks, replacing non-recyclable ink containers with recyclable ones, replacing toxic volatile solvents with citrus-based solvents and ceasing to use toxic isopropyl alcohol. They have also taken measures to recycle heat from heat-producing equipment to warm their building in winter and to duct it out in summer, as well as heat-reflective windows coatings and air conditioning that ducts cooler air from outside when appropriate.

“The Sustainability Advantage program has been wonderful in giving us the support and the skills we need to become more sustainable. The sort of achievements we have made would have been very difficult without the support we have received from Sustainability Advantage. The program has been crucial in helping us get to where we are today.”