Intercolor wins environmental award

Intercolor, a manufacturer and supplier of oil-based and UV-cured inks and varnishes to the printing and packaging industry, has recently won the BSI environmental award for best company in the British SME classification. The award is not industry specific, and all environmentally accredited SME’s in the UK were eligible.

The award was to commemorate the recent 10th anniversary of the BS EN ISO 14001 environmental accreditation, which was first launched in 1996 to replace BS7750. It was presented by NQA, the accreditation body charged by BSI to carry out the accreditation visits.

Intercolor has been committed to environmental best practice for many years, and was the first ink company in the UK to gain accreditation after the launch of the new standard.

The company is located in a new unit on a modern industrial estate in West Thurrock, UK.

This commitment is reflected through out the whole manufacturing process from research and development and the selection of initial raw materials through to final production in the factory. As part of this commitment the company has questioned all their approved suppliers regarding their environmental integrity and has then rated them according to their response.

In their environmental statement, Intercolor pledge to continually strive to improve environmental performance, to ensure compliance with all legislation as it relates to their operations and to reduce waste; re-using and recycling where possible.

This requires the setting of environmental targets, against which the company’s environmental performance is then measured. When the targets are met the financial benefits can be quite significant because the aims and objectives do not just cover issues such as the control of emissions and proper disposal of waste but also a much wider range of energy and waste issues.

For example, one of the company’s stated environmental targets was the reduction of electricity bills and as part of this philosophy they recently invested in new high volume machinery, chosen on the basis of efficiency and power consumption.

This is said to significantly reduce their electricity usage and offers large ongoing cost savings.

In addition, various measures have been taken to reduce the usage and waste of raw materials to a minimum. These include reviewing formulations with a view to rationalizing them and thus minimizing the inventory of raw materials, weighing ingredients to a high degree of accuracy and ensuring that all batches pass the final test with the minimum of additions.

The company has saved further money as a result of implementing better weighing systems and the improved efficiencies that have been gained from better formulation of recipes.

In fact their environmental commitment even goes as far as reducing company car fuel usage. This was achieved by better route planning and produced yet another cost saving.

MD Alex Stevenson states that ISO 14001 environmental accreditation has great significance for the ink industry in general.

He firmly believes that it would be better if all manufacturing companies had to meet this environmental standard, and says that by adopting a genuine environmental stance the company gains a significant operational advantage.

He is also quite adamant that Intercolor is more efficient because of the implementation of its environmental systems and procedures, and did not gain environmental accreditation just to present a green image.

Stevenson says that achieving environmental accreditation is not that difficult for any company that already has ISO 9000 in place as ISO 14001 can basically be bolted on by updating and adding to procedures.