38 www.signlink.co.uk Issue 249 - October / November 2023 NEED TO KNOW / BEING A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS service that we offer to all of our clients. If we are delivering boards on our own transport, we will collect any waste boards from their board erectors during the delivery to ensure the end-of-life boards avoid landfill, recycling over 100 tonnes per year! “As of 2021 all of our customers were switched to this eco-friendly correx as standard, which has proven to be a game changer for the industry. Our aim is to gain as much business as possible, producing UK estate agent boards more sustainably, so that the industry’s carbon footprint is reduced on a national scale. Our pledge to the environment goes back a long way and has been reviewed annually for many years.” In addition to its takeback scheme, Kremer Signs has also taken further steps into ensuring a more sustainable future and maintaining our carbon-neutral status, by partnering with Solarwatt to install 350 high-quality glass to glass solar PV panels, covering the roof space of our 16,000sq ft headquarters in Newbury, Berkshire. This investment covers 65% self-consumption, which means that two-thirds of the energy produced by the company’s solar panel system powers its factory equipment, office power usage, and its electric car ports. Cummuskey adds: “This investment over time will offer a great cost saving, helping us to combat the soaring price rises for energy, which in turn will enable us to maintain competitive pricing for customers. This is a huge step in further reducing our carbon footprint whilst offering our customers the most sustainable estate agency boards on the market. “This form of energy that powers the production of our signage, paired with our exclusive fully recyclable correx sheet which is used to produce our For Sale and To Let boards, FSC-approved timber, and our nationwide scrappage scheme of endof-life boards, offers an unrivalled green solution for UK estate agents, helping them to achieve carbon neutral status through their signage.” Managing Waste Also having found a way to manage its product’s end of life is OPG a company based in Lesmahagow, Scotland that specialises in fleet graphics. We bumped into Tristan Harrold, operations director of OPG at the inaugural WrapFest in Spring with OPG having a presence on the HP area of the event. The company has worked directly with HP for 15 years and was asked to participate based on the proposal that they “do the thing that they say they do” – use HP's print technology to put printed graphics on fleets of vehicles. Using a Tesla, OPG was demonstrating how the A4 printed samples being shown by HP can be used on vehicle graphics with the company using HP Latex technology to produce them. OPG also uses Metamark films and helped the company to pioneer its Metastream recycling program. Through this, OPG’s manufacturing waste, fitting waste, and end-of-life waste is collected which means the company can put graphics onto vehicles and collect them back at end of life. These are then processed by OPG in a way that they can be palletised, and that pallet is then uplifted by Metamark via the Metastream program and recycled into items such as playground slides, park benches, and traffic cones. The liner is then also recycled creating a full circular recycling program. Harrold explains: “The best thing about us at OPG is that we’ve been using Metamark films for seven/eight years before this. We’ve been putting them on vehicles and we can now tell our customers that the material hasn’t changed, it’s just that the process to recycle them has been developed. We can now take those films that have been on the vehicles for the past five years and collect them at end of life when we rebrand and that’s then recycled. “Personally, I’ve worked in this industry for more than 20 years and I wanted to find a solution because I knew that what we were doing wasn’t ultimately sustainable. I wanted to be part of that, not just to sell to the customer but for my own ethics. I wanted to be part of the solution myself as a business but as an individual as well.” Providing an added benefit is the fact that the Metamark materials OPG uses are compatible with HP Latex inks which are water-based, non-hazardous, and safe for disposal. Having used HP Latex ink technology for some time, OPG – which holds ISO 14001:2015 accreditation – says this has helped it to enhance a long-standing reputation for environmental management. Due to OPG holding additional certified management systems such as ISO 9001:2015 for Quality and ISO 45001:2018 for Occupational Health and Safety, the company can easily identify which fleet graphics qualify for MetaStream. With all this said, there are a number of ways you can implement sustainable practices in your business and the great news is there are so many companies already paving the way to a greener future. ▼ Kremer Signs recycles over 100 tonnes of end-oflife boards each year
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