Moving Sustainability Centre Stage

The whole environmental story, often abbreviated to ‘sustainability’, does not require individuals or organisations to wear a hair shirt, ie. for it to be a painful and expensive duty for them. Sustainability is moving centre stage and so it would be good if this is true!

Across industry publications, conferences and reporting, sustainability now sits alongside other key topics such as security, technical excellence, efficiency, value for money etc. Sometimes the ‘voice’ has felt dutiful rather than joyful, sometime even unconvincing and reluctant. We sense this is changing.

As we discovered last year, this industry has done a great deal of work and made a real difference in its operations across the key areas where it affects the environment – energy, transport, materials, wastewater and waste management etc. This year the tone has changed again, becoming more focused, planned and coherent.

Across all that the industry does, the environmental priority is to reduce, reuse, recycle.

Reduce

One can argue that the over two decade quest to increase the life of a banknote, whether the use of coatings and varnish on paper, the development of composite notes or the adoption of polymer banknotes, has all been about reducing the number of notes required and the need to move them around the economy.

Equally, standards such as the GS1 and CashSSP have contributed to allowing data collection through standardised packaging and labelling to optimise the movement of banknotes. The Cash Service Alliance in the Philippines has allowed direct bank to bank cash transfers, saving unnecessary transport costs.

Within the equipment manufacturer, ink, component, substrate and print communities, reduction travels, of course, hand in hand with efficiency and cost reduction and is part of the DNA of a manufacturer, so nothing new there.

Reuse

More recently we have started to see a focus on reuse in new areas for the production side of the industry. The recent KURZ sustainability report describes its new take-back and recycling program, RECOSYS®. This gives customers the opportunity to return any residual materials to KURZ to be processed into new raw materials in its recycling centre.

Kurz has also created a new process that makes high-quality recycled granulate from production waste. Known as RECOPOUND® this recycled material can save up to 40% of CO2 compared to using new material. The declared aim for the future is to reuse the recycled PET carrier for the production of new transfer carriers.

Landqart has made public research it is doing on Durasafe® waste at its end of life (see page 11). Successful trials using autoclaves are now being extended, and part of this research is exploring how much of the material can replace new raw cotton used in paper making.

The UK’s Cash Industry Environmental Charter group is making changes such as moving to cloth bags and padlocks to replace plastic security bags and single use seals. This involves changing processes as well as materials.

Although reuse is difficult in this industry, it is good to see innovation being embraced.

Recycling

CCL Secure and De La Rue have been highly active in providing their customers with the ability to recycle polymer banknotes at the end of life. In the meantime, paper makers and destruction companies such as Hunkeler, Kusters and G+D have also been looking at environmentally sound uses for cotton notes at the end of their lives.

A number of companies have been working to deliver innovative solutions to help with recycling. PragmatIC is working on a solution for reusable packaging systems at scale based on their ultra-low cost NFC technology, which can provide containers with a unique digital identity. MagVision has repurposed its MagID product from protecting abuse in the grey economy to enabling the tracking of materials so that there is low cost data about what is reused or recycled.

Digimarc is focusing on allowing waste management companies to separate different grades of plastic efficiently so that single grade recycling is viable. Again, a transfer of technology from the traditional security space to the green economy.

The UK’s Royal Mint is going further, investing in technology from Excir to allow it to extract gold from e-waste. It is estimated that 7% of the world’s gold is used in circuit boards and currently most is going to landfill.

Final word

There remain significant environmental opportunities in all areas, particularly packaging, ‘right product, right place, right time’, collection and use of data, material selection (less, less impact, circular economy, end of life and ethical sourcing) and, of course, beautifully designed products elegantly made!