“Leave the world better than you found it. Take no more than you need. And if you ever do harm to the environment, make sure that you make amends.”

Sara Osorio, environmental, health and safety affairs coordinator, PRINTING United Alliance, opened the recent “Decoding Sustainability Regulations: What Printers Need To Know” webinar by explaining the basic tenets of sustainability. She put this in context of how sustainability regulations impact the printing industry and what print service providers and promo distributors need to do to meet those regulations while also describing the overall benefits of implementing more sustainable practices into a business.

“Sustainability has been a nice thing to do, but it’s becoming something that you must do at this point,” she said. “Different types of laws and policy are going to be things like greenhouse gas emissions limits and reporting and extended producer responsibility, or EPR, for paper and packaging.”

She did point out that there have been regulatory rollbacks under the Trump administration, including the shift to a 10:1 regulatory freeze, meaning for every one new regulation, 10 need to be taken off the books, an increase from the first Trump administration that instated a 2:1 requirement.

Here are some key takeaways from the recent webinar:

• Regulatory Pressure: New laws, especially in California, are driving change. Legislation like SB-253, SB-261 and AB-1305 requires emissions reporting and proof of carbon-reduction efforts, even for companies indirectly involved through supply chains.
• Scope 3 Emissions: Even if print and promo professionals aren’t directly targeted by revenue thresholds, they are part of larger supply chains. Clients may require them to report Scope 3 emissions to meet their own compliance obligations.
• National Trend: While California leads the charge, similar sustainability legislation is emerging in states like New York, Illinois and Colorado, signaling a broader national trend.
• EPR Expansion: Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a policy that puts the burden of managing waste on the producer. Six states (Maine, California, Colorado, Oregon, Maryland and Minnesota) have passed EPR. Several other states are considering the legislation.
• Strategic Advantage: Brand image, customer loyalty, cost savings and compliance are among the benefits of implementing more sustainable practices into a business.
• Bright Side: Osorio closed out the webinar by observing that “sustainability is not a threat, it is a journey with many opportunities.”

Read the full story and access the on-demand webinar on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, which is in a strategic partnership with ASI.

Read more on Printing Impressions.

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