Ithaca College

Peter Kilcoyne, manager for Printing Services in Marketing Communications, created and has begun to use a new Sustainability Index system to rate our college publications.

The first step of the new publications sustainability rating system is to evaluate the print suppliers to whom we outsource our printing work on their sustainability.  A questionnaire was emailed to each of the print vendors that the college uses on a regular basis. They were asked questions about their operational sustainability, such as if they use vegetable based inks, if they purchase renewable energy credits, and whether they recycle their inks and solvents. The suppliers’ responses to the questions allows our Publication’s staff to rank them on a scale of 1 to 5. Their rating is added to the ranking of the publication in order to determine the overall sustainability rating of the particular print piece.

Among the publication sustainability considerations are: the percentage of post-consumer recycled content of the paper; if the piece is printed without metallic inks or foil; how the finished publication is bound; whether there is an environmental statement printed onto the piece itself; and the packaging of the final product and preparation for mailing. For instance, it is more sustainable to print a publication in the exact quantities necessary to reach the intended audience based upon the mailing list and directly addressing the publication in-line, as opposed to estimating the number of copies of the media piece needed and labeling off-line.

Since Publications has started to use this new system, Kilcoyne reports that the printing vendors rated well: the lowest scored 1.3 and the highest a 3.5 on the 5-point scale. The sustainability rating of our College publications are based on a scale of 10, so when combined with the supplier sustainability rating, our publications are currently running scores in the 2.6 to 5.5 range.

While the most sustainable publication is the one that is never printed at all, that is not practical in terms of delivering the College’s messaging to diverse audiences. This new publications sustainability index provides an objective means of assessing our continuing progress toward creating more sustainable publications.

For more information about the publications sustainability index, contact Peter Kilcoyne, (607) 274-1262, or e-mail: kilcoyne@ithaca.edu.