For those of you designing green print pieces or managing print marketing campaigns, the paper that you print on sometimes isn’t at the forefront of your mind – but increasingly it might be on the mind of your readership. According to a recent report, approximately 25% of consumers tell other consumers not to buy products because of a company’s poor environmental practices.  As marketers, sometimes we don’t do a good enough job of communicating how environmental we actually are – and with printed campaigns, this starts with paper.

In order to address what some consumers believe is “greenwashing” (the practice of falsely portraying a product as green), every industry from Autos to Retail Food depends on third party organizations to provide credence to a company’s claims of environmental responsibility.  Our company achieved chain-of-custody certification from the Forest Stewardship Council to provide some transparency to how we print and use paper.  There are alot of aspects to this accreditation, from their website :

The intent of the FSC system is to shift the market to eliminate habitat destruction, water pollution, displacement of indigenous peoples and violence against people and wildlife that often accompanies logging. Just like other forest products, in order to use the FSC logo as an “environmental claim” on paper, the product must have flowed through the FSC “chain-of-custody” from the FSC-certified forest, to a paper manufacturer, merchant, and finally printer who have FSC chain-of-custody certification.

FSC is probably the largest of the independent certifications that one can get with regard to printed paper products. However, there are other organizations like the Sustainable Forestry Initiative with a long list of conservation supporters that endorse timber and paper companies like the one we use.  These organizations exist to provide both transparency and a source of information to consumers, so why not help educate by mentioning that chain-of-custody responsibility which passes on to your brand (if you use a provider that is certified).

Besides the marketing benefit of mentioning this in a message – think about what this really means – that we can know we’re doing the right thing to both live in society and manage it sustainably.