26 sustainability initiatives shared at last week’s
Visual 1st Photo Print Sustainability Spotlight
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Last week, close to 70 North American and European photo print industry executives joined our Visual 1st Sustainability Spotlight to hear from 11 industry peers how they’ve developed sustainability practices aimed at reducing waste, pollution and carbon footprint.
A great thanks to the following presenters, who were kind enough to share a synopsis of their sustainability initiatives with their industry peers!
Presenter list:
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1. (Suppliers of) Photo print product manufacturers
Fujifilm
- For all its worldwide business units combined, Fujifilm plans to reduce CO2 emissions by 50% by 2030 compared to 2019, with a further goal to have zero CO2 emissions by 2040.
- In terms of its silver halide printing offering, Fujifilm not only captures and recycles silver in its own labs, the company is also developing technology that will enable its B2B customers to capture and recycle 99.999% of their silver waste.
- Using green energy is one of Fujifilm’s sustainability pillars. Fujifilm’s Tilburg (The Netherlands) site is powered by 5 large onsite wind turbines and an offsite wind park, which will soon be complemented by an e-boiler to store and use wind & sun-power instead of natural gas.
American Direct Sales (ADS)
- Spurred by B2B customers who have been increasingly demanding more environmentally safe substrates, ADS spent time during COVID to research the use of alternative materials, such as hexagon cardboard-based backing instead of foam core or other non-recyclable materials for its canvas products, and paper-based materials for its yard sign products.
- For HOPE Prints, one of its customers, ADS developed a reusable picture frame, which enables easy sliding in and out of photos, without the consumer needing to order completely new wall décor products each time when they feel the urge to hang new photos on their wall.
Felix Schoeller
- Paper production involves large amounts of raw materials, energy and water. Today, Felix Schoeller’s printing papers are 100% FSC certified, the company has saved 1.2 billion liters of fresh water since 2016 and reduced CO2 emission by 16% over the last 5 years.
- Going forward, the company has embarked on a research project along with industry and academic partners to rethink the whole paper making process by developing a model mill for carbon-neutral paper production (The Paper Mill of the Future). In addition, the company rebuilt its main paper mill (The Green Lighthouse Project) with the goal to reduce CO2 emission by 30% and water usage by 50% by 2025 from the levels of 2019. The goal for 2030 is to reduce CO2 by 80% and have 100% closed water loops.
Epson
- All Epson’s European sales companies are fully powered by renewable sources for their electricity. Epson’s European sales branch companies moved to renewable electricity whenever the landlord agreed to make the shift. Epson reduced truck usage for transportation from Rotterdam Port to its Central Distribution Center and opted for rail (70%) and barge (28%), using trucks for only 2% of transportation.
- In the next 10 years Epson worldwide will invest €770M in programs aimed at decarbonization, resource recycling and developing environmental technologies.
- It currently offers heat-free ink jets, EcoTanks that replace plastic cartridges (which has generated a savings of 1.6M tons of plastic waste to date), and a new generation of digital textile printers that reduce water by up to 90% and energy use by 30% compared to analog methods. As an experimental project, Epson is also developing PaperLab, aimed to be the world’s first in-office paper recycling device.
2. B2C/B2B photo print product vendors with their own photo printing facilities
ifolor
- Besides actual sustainability practices, cornerstones to ifolor’s sustainability strategy are the systematic collection and calculation of CO2 emissions, as well as the transparent communication of its sustainability practices and impact calculations to its customers. The company has collected CO2 emission data since 2011.
- In addition to various tactics to reduce carbon emissions, such as switching to waterpower-derived electricity and recycling various types of materials and chemical waste, ifolor runs its Happy Hour – Happy Earth program, which plants a tree for every new customer order.
puzzleYou
- For puzzleYou sustainability initiatives are not only motivated by environmental reasons, but also by economic (such as reducing energy consumption and raw materials) and marketing reasons (more and more consumers demand greener products).
- A seemingly easy change (removing shrink wrap around the puzzle boxes) did take puzzleYou, which produces 1M products a year, 1.5 years to complete. The production line changes included replacing 3 shrink tunnels and finding, testing and putting in production a special varnish that offers protection similar to that of shrink wrap. But… eliminating the shrink wrap saves the company – and the environment – 300 miles of foil per year.
Picanova
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Picanova manufactures up to 500K individualized products daily. 97% of the wood used to produce canvas frames comes from the company’s own FSC-certified Latvian production.
- The company’s production team is charged to keep finding better way to reduce packaging, including through smart demand-based planning to minimize waste and by developing more sustainable packaging materials.
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Picanova aims to plant 35K trees per year, including through company events by its own employees, which fosters environmental engagement and team building among its employees.
RPI
- Planning good sustainability practices starts with quantifying your company’s actual environmental impact, so you can be strategic in setting your priorities. RPI started calculating its CO2 emissions in Europe last year and are now in the process of also implanting this for its US facilities.
- For RPI working closely with partners in its supply chain (ranging from suppliers, to shipping vendors, to customers) has been crucial for developing effective sustainability practices.
3. B2C photo print product vendors without their own photo printing facilities
Once Upon
- As a B2C company without its own printing plant(s), collaboration with suppliers has been a must for Once Upon to reduce the carbon footprint of its photo print products. Since the company started its sustainability strategy early last year, this collaboration has resulted in switching to renewable energy at the production sites, FSC certification, reducing the size of print product packaging and removing plastic from its packaging.
- For Once Upon it’s crucial for our industry as a whole to come together to share information and collaborate where possible in order to accelerate further innovation of sustainable practices.
PastBook
- For PastBook producing its photo print products locally has been an important strategy to not only reduce CO2 emissions caused by shipping, but to also reduce delivery time and transportation costs. Between 85%-90% of PastBook’s print products are now produced in the same country as where its customers are located.
- Through an external environmental study PastBook found that electricity usage is the biggest factor contributing to its company’s footprint, followed by transportation and data storage (the extent of which being a surprise and triggering PastBook to reduce the time its customers’ photos can reside on PastBook’s servers).
Canva
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Canva’s Australian operations have been carbon neutral since 2020. As of 2021, Canva’s entire global operations, including print and subsidiaries, are also carbon neutral.
- In a lifecycle assessment study, Canva found that a large percentage of greenhouse gas emissions associated with their print products come from shipping the products from the print provider to the customer. This insight has triggered an expansion of Canva’s manufacturing and distribution policy, resulting in guidelines such as expanding manufacturing locations to reduce miles travelled and expanding retail locations for in-store production and exploring locker-style pickup services.
- Offsetting CO2 emissions is part of the journey, but the goal is to focus on regeneration and repair of the environment. Canva’s reforestation projects then function more as “insets” rather than “offsets.”
We look forward to continuing the dialog in-person at Visual 1st and/or online!
Any suggestions or announcements? Please drop us a note! |
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Insta360 & Leica. Expanding their relationship into 360. Insta360 announces the Insta360 ONE RS 1-inch 360 Edition, a 360-degree camera co-engineered with Leica. Featuring dual 1-inch sensors, the $799 camera pushes the imaging envelope, generating 6K 360 video and 21 MP 360 photos. Like the original Insta360 ONE RS that was also developed in partnership with Leica, the camera supports swappable lenses, including a 1/2"-type 48MP sensor, a 5.7K sensor and a larger 5.3K 1-inch Wide Angle Lens.
VSCO. Reinventing 1.0: Bye-bye VSCO girls. Photo & video creation app developer, VSCO has shifted focus back to “serious creators”, while adding (more) Adobe alumni in its management team, and coming out with more features for sharing, collaborating and remixing.
The Metaverse Standards Forum. Sign of growing up: creating standards. A large and diverse group of industry players, including Adobe and Meta (presenters at our Visual 1st The Metaverse Spotlight), Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Unity, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Epic Games, Huawei and IKEA – just to name a few – have banded together to create standards around a host of technologies that fall under the idea of the metaverse, including collaborative spatial computing, such as interactive 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, photorealistic content authoring, geospatial systems, end-user content tooling, digital twins, real-time collaboration, physical simulation, online economies, and multi-user gaming. Who’s missing from the Metaverse Standards Forum? Most notably: Oops, it’s Apple and Google – at least for now.
Scenery. Video collaboration attracting $. Not bad: still in alpha, video collaboration solution developer Scenery just raised $14.6M in a Series A from Greylock, Craft, Figma Ventures, Night Ventures, among others. Cloud-based video collaboration is a hot use case (the reason why Adobe acquired Frame.io last August for a whopping $1.3B).
Walmart, Snaps, IKEA. AR getting real: it’s shopping, baby. Just imagine a few years from now when we might look back at today and say, “Remember the time when the majority of shopping apps still came without AR?” The last few weeks we’re witnessing one AR shopping feature announcement after another.
IKEA launched IKEA Kreativ, an iOS and desktop app that lets US shoppers visualize furniture in their own spaces. Nice touch: Kreativ can also remove existing furniture from view so that you can better imagine the IKEA furniture you’re considering buying.
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