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Environmental savings for 2008 - Following are the approximate savings that Spectrum made during 2008. Because we print waterless we don't use alcohol and we have saved 1,041,000 cubic meters of vapour evaporating into our environment as a greenhouse gas. 85,000 litres of water not wasted and 39 tonnes of tree mass saved. Because we offset our emissions from our factories electricity and the exhaust emissions from our cars, we planted 1,000 trees for our clients.

Recycle your mobile phone......   A lot of us like life to be as easy as possible. What do you do with your out of date mobiles? You can leave it with us or call us and we will send out an envelope for you to put your phone in and post, no cost to you. The phone will arrive at one of the Spastic Centres facilities where, if they are not too old, will be cleaned and shipped overseas for re sale in delveloping countries. If the phones are beyond this, all components will be recycled. The Spastic Centre will receive $3 - $5 per phone. So you help people that need help and, you help the environment.

If you choose to use Spectrum as your printer, we will plant a tree for you!!    Spectrum offsets the power needed to run our factroy and offsets the emmissions from our cars. We plant trees using Greenfleet. We will plant one for you!

PS. We were the first print company to do this & we can prove it! Don't believe the rest, they followed us!

Lets get our act together!

The following is from an article that appeared in the Sydney Morning Hearld on Thursday 24th January. "Australia is one of the WORST performing nations when it comes to addressing climate change, according to an annual ranking of 149 countries by researchers at Yale & Columbia universities in the USA" 

The waterless printing process is world's best practice for the environment, the process is "environmentally preferable". Printing companies that choose not to print waterless do have a greater effect on global warming simply because of their process. Printing waterless means we get the same result with less. Our environmental footprint is smaller. Only printers that print waterless eliminate the need for dangerous chemicals that impact on global warming. Individually, we see global warming as such a massive problem. "How could little old me make a difference?" Assessing the environmental impact of our day-to-day decisions can be the first step. If you are going to print and you choose a waterless printer, tell your current supplier that they no longer have your custom because you have found a better outcome for the environment, eventually the penny will drop! Let's see if we can improve our ranking. By the way, the researchers found we got beaten by the Kiwi's.                                                                       

How you can save 1 litre of water for every dollar you spend ...    Printing presses needlessly consume water. Manufacturing recycled paper uses less water than making paper from trees. (The amount is calculated with information on recycled paper located on the NSW Department of the Environment and Conservation website). We therefore took those figures and combined them. We found that for every dollar spent one litre of water is saved!                                                         

Supply chain integrity ......      Environmental responsibility within a business is fairly simple. Recognise areas of concern. A few examples would be the over use of energy, waste and a lack of recycling. Apply processors to improve. Once in place it is good to set a target and then have a simple way to measure the progress. Celebrate the changes within the business and encourage vigilance, a job well done, you and your business are doing the right thing. What about the goods and services your business purchases? Read more on "Supply chain integrity" copy the link below

http://www.brba.com.au/newspublications/mediareleases.cfm?ArticleID=336

Environmental savings .....       Spectrum opened for business in August 1996. Since then, the customers that chose to use us instead of a traditional printers have made a huge difference to the environment.

1)  33 tonnes of volatile organic compounds in the form alcohol*, greenhouse gases, NOT realeased into our atmosphere. 2) 150 tonnes of trees remain in the ground. 3) 45 million litres of water have not been wasted.

*Alcohol, as a liquid, is used in conjunction with water when printing traditionally. The alcohol then evaporates, greenhouse gas, into our atmosphere. 33 tonnes of alcohol will expand as a gas into an area of 12.1 million cubic metres. This is the same area as 148 MLC buildings!

Spectrum is not a huge printer. Imagine combining all the printers together who are not printing waterless and measure their alcohol usage! How many MLC centres would that be? Some printers use an alchol substitute, usually containing glycol ethers, and claim they don't harm the atmosphere. Well where does this chemical miraculously go? It gets absorbed into the paper!  What happens to it then? The paper gets handled. What happens to it then? It gets tranferred to the handler then gets absorbed by the skin!

Waterless printing, because it is just ink on paper, means we literally use less stuff to get the same job done!

What is ISO 14024?      ISO 14024 is an internationally recognised environmental standard for products that are of superior quality, and comply fully with strict environmental guidelines set by the standard. All ISO 14024 jobs come with the Good Environmental Choice logo letting your customers know that you choose environmentally preferable, high quality print.

ISO 14024 ensures that your print product has complied with the very highest levels of environmentally friendly production, which follows the product all the way through the process, from the stock used, to the print process, to the packaging when it is sent to you.

Furthermore, because ISO 14024 products must be of a high standard, you can be assured that being environmentally aware has not sacrificed the quality of your print job.

My printing company has ISO 14001 – isn’t that as good? Not by a long shot. With ISO 14001, your printing company only has to ensure that it makes as little impact as possible on the environment, without actually having to totally change the process to make it environmentally preferable. With ISO 14024, Spectrum Printing goes far beyond ISO14001 – to comply, our processes must be optimised for the smallest environmental impact possible – from start to finish. So much so, that Spectrum Printing is the only printer in Australia to be ISO 14024 verified. So while other printers using traditional methods of printing may be trying to clean up their act, they are hampered by their outdated print process and their overuse of unnecessary chemicals, Spectrum Printing has taken the biggest leap forward of any print company in Australia and has the least overall impact on the environment.

Why should I switch to Spectrum Printing?      Firstly, service, quality and price are important, so is good corporate governance. If you or your company care about having the most environmentally friendly print job possible, the only option is to go with us.Only the Good Environmental Choice Label can ensure that your job meets the highest international environmental standards.

As the only certified company in Australia, Spectrum is the printing company that can offer you a quality, environmentally friendly print job, with the international certification to prove it. When you combine this with our ability to let you know exactly how much water and paper waste you have saved the environment, there is only one choice for the environment – Spectrum

Our commitment ..........      Our unique process simply means we use less to provide the same, therefore our overall "footprint" on the environment is less, more sustainable. Chemicals in any form of manufacturing are inevitable. How a company then disposes of these is the measure of it's day to day commitment to the environment. At Spectrum the trackability of this type of waste is paramount. Metal drums we use are recycled. Printer's rags contain volatile organic compounds and go to land fill. Our practice is to have our drums and rags collected by an EPA licensed waste mangement company. Printers rags are a product that up til now have simply been collected and dumped. We have managed to seek out a way of turning this environmental problem around. Printers rags are now collected and washed. This process allows the volatile organic compounds to rise to the surface. This is then collected and burned as an alternative fuel, the rags are then returned to the market. This may not seem much, however at Spectrum every step we take to further reduce our footprint on the environment is an example of our commitment and a standard to which all other printers should hold up as an environment benchmark.

Cartridges 4 Planet Ark ......      Spectrum printing has joined the 'Cartridges 4 Planet Ark' program - a toner and ink cartridge remanufacturing and recycling program where nothing donated goes to waste. This campaign is designed specifically by Planet Ark to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfill.

Spray Powder ......       At the delivery end of a printing press a powder is spayed on each individual sheet to stop the ink setting off and ruining the job. This powder is not particularly friendly to the printer or the environment. Our production manager Lex set himself the goal of finding something better. The result is a 100% Non Toxic vegtable based spray powder. Another environmental improvment!

Spectrum goes carbon neutral .....     Lots of companies aim to consider their effect on the environment within their premises and for some that's it. Now Spectrum takes another step. Every time an appliance, a machine or even a light is switched on fossil fuels are burned. The result of this is more pollutants in the atmosphere. Spectrum realised that with a bit of effort this can be neutralised. We have planted more than enough trees to soak up our carbon output making Spectrum the first printing company in Australia to be "carbon neutral". If you feel this is a responsible procedure for your company to adopt, please contact us for more info....

Environmental awards .....      The Willoughby Council Business Community Awards were held on Wednesday 15th. Amoungst the awards was a section for outstanding Environmental achievement. At last the merits of waterless printing are being tested... we passed with flying colours. If you are are not printing waterless, when will you be changing?

Visy Recycling programme .....  Spectrum introduces "Visy makes recycling easy". Throughout the office area each employee has their own cardboard recycling box for paper, bins are provided for glass, plastic bottles and aluminum cans. In the factory industrial sized bins are used for all paper waste. Visy recycles this once a week.