Get Your Green On

Mike Lawing, growll.com vice president of operations, observed more companies on a national level are requiring their vendors to be a part of this initiative. And Sam Vignjevic, e-commerce director, said, "We were very excited when the announcement came that we had been certified because we had been doing these requirements for years. Now we have the certification to show for it and can provide our resellers an additional product to offer their customers."

It may be too early to predict if the company will see repeat business, but Reaves did note customers have indicated a desire to print more certified products with them.

Independent Printing Company is FSC-certified, which can be an extensive process, but Vogel acknowledged the payoff is substantial. Meanwhile, The Flesh Company is both FSC and SFI chain of custody certified. Gerling remarked the certification process will cause less headaches if a company has good inventory control and accounting processes in place. "Once you have documented your processes, then you have to be able to prove that you have the 'checks' in place to ensure that you follow the same process every time. You also have to stand up to an annual recertification audit by the individual organizations," he stated.

Getting Serious

All three companies are able to support their claims through their business products and policies. Lawing stressed growll.com always reviews materials to see if the company can make it a green purchase before making the actual purchase. Vignjevic expanded, "On the front end, we've streamlined several areas from eliminating paper usage from our internal workflow processes to redesigning our paper swatch in our reseller kit that now uses two-thirds less paper than our old one."

Reaves and Vignjevic often receive requests inquiring whether a particular type or brand of paper is compliant with one of the programs so a customer can use the corresponding logo on his or her printed product. Vignjevic added, "The requests for FSC-certified papers are picking up as more and more of our customers find out about our certification."