David Finn: Time for a change

If you'd asked people five years ago to predict the biggest impetus to change within the printing industry for 2007 and beyond, I doubt many would have been able to pick the environment. But that’s where we are, climate change is upon us and the environment will continue to demand that we reshape businesses globally.

Sustainability is becoming a requirement
Whether governments impose further legislation upon businesses regarding sustainability and emissions is inevitable, but business can’t afford to be complacent and wait for this to happen or they will be left behind. Consumers are demanding this level of accountability now and will vote with their feet. The customers I speak with are increasingly concerned about these issues and there is a growing impetus within their organisations to change their purchasing to become more sustainable and move towards carbon neutrality.

Goldman Sachs JBWere just announced that stockmarket analysts are already anticipating higher electricity prices caused by the imposition of some form of price on carbon emissions. So it’s only a matter of time before this is a real cost of doing business.

And I mean it when I say customers are voting with their feet. The ground swell of public opinion about global warming and concern for the environment is growing. Increasingly my team at Kyocera is seeing a change in attitudes of purchasing personnel in large corporate and government organisations. For instance, our fifth generation of printers is the first and only in the world to be completely ozone free. Customers are going crazy for it; we’ve seen a massive volume sales increase of more than 30 per cent in this range. When we tell them we’ve recently added RoHS compliance through the range where we exclude six hazardous materials: lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE), all of a sudden they’re really paying attention. That certainly wouldn’t have been the case a few years ago but this trend towards buying sustainable products will hopefully continue and those vendors who can’t adapt and offer products which address these concerns will be left behind.

What will green cost me?
Often what I hear from resellers and the channel is margins in the printing industry are increasingly tight and I know they fear that green considerations will just add cost to their bottom line. This really isn’t the case, to be successful in this market you have to listen to what your customer is telling you, be able to adapt and always looking for ways to add value.

Fortunately for Kyocera we have a significant edge in environmental sustainability. We’re not just Johnny come lately taking on the environment as a current fad. It’s been part of who Kyocera is since 1984 and our products have been designed with the environment in mind. It’s a huge advantage, as technology such as ECOSYS (which means customers replace the toner only rather than drum and developer unit, reducing unnecessary waste and costs drastically) is obviously not inexpensive to develop, but this technology has been incorporated in our products since the 1990s so we have absorbed those development costs long ago.

There are a number of ways businesses and resellers in particular can incorporate green policies into their everyday operations which will not only save the business money but will make you a more appealing vendor to your customers and a more sustainable entity. Kyocera has commissioned a number of

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