Chief Marketing Officer, Emma Weston, on how Miraclon is helping deliver on the print sustainability goals pursued by our customers and brands.
In the last four years, the packaging printing industry has been through constant change due to various pressures including Covid, supply chain crisis and inflation. While these pressures have begun to stabilize, brands continue to focus on continuity of supply, driving more efficient SKUs, and prioritizing sustainability to protect the environment.
These trends are creating increasing requirements for printers to be more efficient and sustainable in their production. Emma Weston explains how Miraclon is committed to supporting its customers in achieving their sustainability goals in a way that delivers maximum impact throughout the flexo print process.
Q: How is Miraclon approaching environment, social and governance (ESG) activity in 2024?
Our environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda is committed to serving our employees, our customers and our stakeholders. We place a high priority on sustainability, but also on being a responsible supplier, partner and employer.
We participate in the global packaging value chain that places increasing importance on environmental responsibility and are committed to supporting our customers in achieving their sustainability goals in a way that delivers maximum impact in the print process, end-to-end.
When looking at how we can impact sustainability, we take a holistic approach that extends beyond a lifecycle analysis of our products and related manufacturing processes to the impact that our technology and services can have on the complete packaging printing value chain. We are focused on understanding the big, material impacts and challenging how we can actually make a difference. Fundamentally, the best ESG agenda is founded on doing the right things for a business.
Q: How does Miraclon go about identifying where the most meaningful changes can be made?
It’s vital to think about not only improving the environmental footprint of your ‘own house’ but how your sphere of influence can be as large as possible, right through the value chain. That might be multiple steps ahead of where we think our influence ends.
As a result, in practical terms we have two key areas of focus within our company regarding sustainability:
- What we enable for our customers
- Our focus is on products and services, and a future technology innovation roadmap, that enable customers to reduce the overall carbon footprint and environmental impact of printed packaging production.
- As a responsible supplier we also make available the information that customers need to benchmark their own environmental impact and comply with legislation and reporting requirements.
- What we do internally to reduce our own environmental footprint, including a commitment to reduce the impact of our manufacturing plants and distribution operations.
“When looking at how we can impact sustainability, we take a holistic approach that extends beyond a lifecycle analysis of our products and related manufacturing processes to the impact that our technology and services can have on the complete packaging printing value chain.”
Q: So how is Miraclon taking forward this ESG strategy to create a more sustainable packaging value chain?
As an innovator of flexo plate technology and manufacturer of flexo plates, our approach could have been to concentrate on the environmental footprint of the physical product that we manufacture and ship to the customer; including raw materials, manufacturing processes and distribution. We could say that’s where our sphere of influence ends: when we’ve delivered our product and the customer is using it in their production process.
However, our sphere of influence extends way beyond the production of a plate. The most dramatic environmental impact a flexo plate can have takes place in the printing process itself – on press. FLEXCEL NX Technology is a key enabler of modern flexo, a standardized, sustainable way of printing that enables flexo printers to operate more efficiently, reduce waste and use less energy – simultaneously resulting in economic benefits.
Q: What are the main areas of the print production process where you’re seeing environmental impacts being made?
The on-press performance benefits that FLEXCEL NX Technology provides are helping to support customer sustainability initiatives in several ways.
- Printers and brands are focusing a lot of attention on packaging materials. Recycled materials, recyclable materials, thinner materials and plant-based materials, as well as water-based inks. Often these provide more challenging print conditions which we are helping printers to overcome with plate technology and print optimization.
- Flexo printing offers greater versatility than other print processes in the range of substrates that it can support, and typically a lower environmental footprint. In many cases we are helping customers that want to move work from gravure or offset to flexo to ensure that they can make the transition while maintaining visual parity with previous production.
- Driving efficient production. Modern flexo, enabled by Miraclon’s plate technology is designed to reduce set-up times, reduce unscheduled stoppages and reduce the number of inks required to print each job. All of these practices reduce waste, increase resource utilization, and in fact, improve the bottom line.
We are sharing examples of all the above in customer case studies – Champions of Modern Flexo – that will take center stage on our booth at drupa2024.
In addition, our portfolio is full of products and product enhancements that are designed to improve the environmental footprint of the platemaking process itself. The chart below provides an overview of how we think about impact.
Q: And what about the social and governance aspects of your ESG work within the industry?
First and foremost, we have to recognize that we are part of the value chains of our customers. We are a supplier to them, and are committed to provide them with all the information they need to demonstrate we’re a responsible supplier.
We’re working directly with customers to make available the information they need to benchmark their own environmental impact and comply with legislation and reporting requirements – that’s table stakes. Beyond that, through our knowledge-based services, we’re making sure our customers understand how they can use our technology to not only understand their baseline position, but improve it for the future to drive a more efficient production process, optimized to print on more sustainable materials, to increase the uptime of a press.
To help our customers to make continued progress towards reducing their environmental footprint, we have a focus on sustainability as part of our product technology roadmap. Our commercialization process for all new products includes sustainability goals.
“It has to be fundamentally something that is ingrained in what is good for a business in order to make it successful. To move the environmental agenda forward it has to be financially viable for everyone in the value chain.”
Q: How are you working with prepress customers on this?
Our prepress partners essentially deliver this same value to their printer clients. An important part of our responsibility is ensuring that our trade shop partners have the information they need to facilitate the conversations with their own customers.
It’s about showing how it doesn’t end with the plate arriving on the printer’s premises, but how they can use their expertise and the differentiated technology they are providing to help improve the environmental footprint of that printer.
Q: And how is Miraclon lowering the environmental impact of its own operations?
As a global manufacturing company, our focus is on reducing the impact in the distribution of our products, and local initiatives within our manufacturing organizations to optimize our use of energy and reduce our waste, while increasing our manufacturing yield.
We have specific initiatives around reducing the amount of packaging material that we use to transport products, while still protecting the product that we deliver. We’ve recently made significant changes to the packaging for some of our biggest runners so that when we ship products around the world, we have greater packing density in shipping containers and trucks, thereby reducing the environmental impact per sqm of product shipped.
Q: Can there be competing actions or priorities within ESG work?
At a fundamental level I don’t think actions are competing. There’s a level of pressure that comes with brands setting aggressive targets, legislation emerging at varying rates, and everybody trying to navigate their way through a changing landscape. This can impact perception of priorities. It’s often not clear where the biggest impact can be made. One difficulty can be trying to collectively agree on what is most important so that we’re not asking unreasonable things of each other.
Q: Is it possible for sustainability changes to also make business sense in its traditional meaning?
Absolutely. And they should. In ESG terms, when you think about assessing where you can impact there’s this notion of double materiality – what’s the impact on the environment but also what’s the financial impact for a business. Businesses need to be sustainable.
The reassuring thing about how we’re focusing on sustainability is that it’s inextricably linked with efforts to help drive financial return on investment for our customers, because sustainability cannot be a separate part of the business agenda.
Driving efficiency, lowering wastage, it all has a positive impact on the financial bottom line. It has to be fundamentally something that is ingrained in what is good for a business in order to make it successful. To move the environmental agenda forward it has to be financially viable for everybody in the value chain.
“By having an open dialogue, we can work together to make sure the right questions are being asked, that we’re providing the most important data and taking the best course of action.”
Q: Where are main pressures coming from for printers and prepress businesses to act on environmental impact?
Firstly, there’s environmental pressure to improve coming from the consumer, that’s the main driver of brand commitments, which in turn are driving printers, prepress and other suppliers to respond.
And secondly, governmental and regulatory requirements are increasing, with policies and legislation focused on setting and reporting against key initiatives, key metrics that support the overall ESG position. European legislation is driving changes around the world in this. Take the EU’s CSRD initiative. Businesses of different sizes will be required to report against ESG KPIs on topics material to their business in the same way they report financial results.
That’s going to evolve and roll out over the next few years and is driving a lot of the questions as businesses get ready.
Q: This is an ever-evolving area. How can the industry keep up?
It’s ever-evolving partly because the whole industry is trying to ensure that we are collectively doing the right things – and those are not always clear. We’re conducting lifecycle analyses, looking at where the impacts happen; we’re all learning and one of the ways the industry can keep up is by sharing methodologies, sharing successes and, importantly, always having a dialogue around the questions we’re asking each other.
By having an open dialogue, we can work together to make sure the right questions are being asked, that we’re providing the most important data and taking the best course of action.