Greenerprinter's Sustainable Green Printing Partnership Certification

What is SGP?

The printing industry is an important part of the world's manufacturing community. Print plays a vital role in communication, education, and daily existence. The printing industry has historically understood its effect on the natural world and accepts responsibility to continue efforts to reduce its overall environmental impact.

The SGP Partnership recognizes the following sustainable business practices as guiding principles to ensure continued viability and growth:

• Employ, wherever and whenever possible, materials derived from renewable resources or with low environmental impact, maximizing recycling and recovery efforts with efficient utilization of renewable energy.
• Encourage the adoption of changes within the supply chain by strongly recommending the use of raw materials that do not threaten or harm future generations.
• Educate the customer and ultimate consumer regarding the benefits of a restorative economy.

Printers can be listed as a certified SGP Printer by meeting a set of criteria to establish performance standards. The list of certified SGP Printers is available to the print buying community so that they can easily identify and contact "green" printers within their area.

Criteria
The SGP Partnership describes sustainability for the printing sector by use of the terms product, process and envelope. Taken together, these terms provide printers with a useful "road map" of sustainability in their activities, products and services. All of these elements are important when defining sustainable printing operations.

• Product includes the design aspects and input material management to create the product.
• Process includes all manufacturing steps (e.g. prepress, press and postpress) involved with converting raw materials into a finished product including process by-products (e.g. solid wastes, air pollution and wastewater) that have an environmental, health and safety impact.
• Envelope includes all the manufacturing support activities and includes the building, grounds, utilities, employees, and other functions at an individual site.

The SGP Certification Criteria embody this principle. Sustainability is not limited to the environmental dimension. The scope of the SGP Partnership goes beyond environmental considerations to include "corporate social responsibility" and "corporate citizenship" elements.

To download and read a full description of the criteria, visit the SGP website.

Visit Greenerprinter's listing on the SGP site

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