Where do we stand on saving the planet?

A question was recently brought up about what Synergy Design & Print does to lower their impact on the environment especially in our industry, if they do anything at all!

Of course we do! And we thought we'd share it with you. We reduce our impact on the environment in several ways:

1. We’re paperless! (As much as a business can be).
2. We email all our invoices. Saving paper, ink, envelopes and reducing transportation pollutants.
3. We do email newsletters. Instead of printing out over 100 double sided A4 sheets and posting them, we email our clients to let them know what we’ve been up to.
4. We receive all our bank statements via email and supply them electronically with our end of year accounts (again electronically) to our accountants
5. Emailing is my friend. All files sent to printers and clients, are emailed rather than saved to DVD or CD.
6. All our archives are saved to a portable hard drive – reuseable. Instead of putting onto a DVD (which has an expiry date and will need to be thrown away).
7. We work from offices at my family home. This helps reduce our carbon footprint, by avoiding transportation pollutants, fluro lights, extra water, power etc. And also gives me the opportunity to have my children with me at home.
8. We work off laptops, the electricity to power a laptop is significantly lower than a desktop computer and screen.
9. Synergy Print encourages clients to only purchase the amount of marketing that they will need ie To purchase 250 flyers instead of purchasing 500 for $50 more and then throwing the extra out. It simply is not worth paying the $50 for the waste it generates.
10. We find alternatives for our clients to save both money AND the environment. We have a client who has recently developed their own skincare range. It was Synergy Design who came up with the concept of using glass bottles for the product and offering an ‘empties’ services to refill their customers bottles.
11. Synergy has also just completed a full range of artwork for an eco company who provide bamboo cotton tees printed in organic vegetable ink. We fit the organic theme into the brand working with the printers to produce media that had little impact on the environment.
12. And we have a nifty little message at the end of our emails that go something like this: Good planets are hard to find - please think of the environment before you print this email.