Phil: We're going to be doing something a bit different this week. We're going to be discussing how businesses can improve their environmental impact and make progress on their sustainability goals by taking a look at their printing. Yeah, it's a bit different, but if you're a little skeptical about whether this episode will be relevant to you, listen on because I guarantee you'll never think about your business printing in the same way ever again. I'm delighted to say that we're joined by Gareth Dinnage, the owner and managing director of Seacourt Printers in Oxford. Gareth, welcome to the underground.

Gareth: Thanks very much. Good morning guys. Lovely being here.

Phil: So the strapline for Seacourt Printers is planet friendly printing. Can you just tell me what you mean by that?

Gareth: Yeah, it's actually planet positive printing Phil, sorry! I don't want to pull you up from the on the first question.

Kate: It’s a good start.

Gareth: But it is important, because, there's quite a big difference between friendly and positive. I guess what, Planet Positive printing is, is it's an ambition. It's an ambition to get to a point, where we have a business which is regenerative, as against doing less harm. That's a big, big ambition. Especially for a manufacturer. But, over the past 30 years nearly now, we are working our way towards that. And, what's really exciting is I believe we can achieve it.

Phil: That's amazing.

Gareth: So creating a regenerative business, one that is actually doing good on a number of aspects, not just carbon.

Phil: Excellent.

Kate: So I'm just gonna go back to basics a little bit Gareth. So I mean, I like to think it's common knowledge, I hope it's common knowledge about using recycled paper, at the very least paper from managed forests. So, just tell us why printing is bad for the environment, bad for the planet?

Gareth: Well, it doesn't have to be Kate. That's that's kind of, our approach, and proof that it that it that actually, it doesn't have to be. The printing industry’s massive. And it's really resource intensive. So a conventional printer uses a lot of water. It then pollutes it because it's not wet enough with some of the most obnoxious chemicals ever created.

They then release volatile organic compounds. So this is the nasties that are coming off all the chemicals that conventional printers use. I don't know if you've ever walked into a in a printing company, but you'll know when you walk in it's that bad. And so we've, we've designed all of that out of all of our process. And then also we're talking about, you know, where the effluents go out. We use a lot of paper as you were saying, a natural resource. We use a huge amount of energy. The industry generates loads of landfill. Landfill is a significant issue, generating a lot of methane, as I'm sure you guys are aware. So you put all this together, and it consumes a lot of materials and it's quite polluting. And interestingly, people say, oh I'm not printing, I just put it online. So what's happening when we're putting things online, if you're creating a PDF that people spend 20 minutes reading, where's the power come, where's the power come from to power the laptop or the device? And then we're talking about the carbon impact of that device.

And its such a interesting conversation that you actually start to reconsider what is a truly environmental way of disseminating information.

Kate: That is fascinating, because you know, just a very simple example, often you get, after an email, you know, stop, think before you print this, save paper. But you are talking about so much more than just paper that I think so many people, especially, you know, myself, never even thought about the kind of water side, the chemicals that you're talking about, the contaminants. You know, working in the garden industry we're always talking about pesticides and, you know, artificial fertilisers. But this is a huge part of the whole printing process. So it's not just about the paper that we are using. So I think that's really, really good information you're giving us Gareth. So thank you for that.

Gareth: Our approach is that actually it doesn't have to be that way. We've, reinvented the printing process so we don't use any water. We don't use any chemicals. I've got, a huge PV array on our roof that we're powered by a 100% renewable energy. We're only using 100% VOC free chemicals. Our factory is carbon neutral. We sent the last bin to landfill in 2009. And so we've virtually mapped the entire carbon impact of our material things from forests to end of life and everything in between. And we've taken ownership of it. And what's really interesting is that 99.3% of our carbon impact, are scope three impacts. That means that they're not within our two factories here in Oxford, but they're within our supply chain. And so it's it's the suppliers that are the responsible for that. But because our approach is we want to show that printing can be truly sustainable, we take ownership, for these carbon impacts, these environmental impacts that are happening in our downstream and therefore we wrap all this up and that comes back to this planet positive printing where we measure and we calculate, and we've done absolutely everything we can to reduce the impacts. And we can qualify all this. So we produce carbon reports, environmental statements, the jobs that we produce for our clients that we can say we've saved X amount of carbon, we've saved X amount of water, we've saved X amount of landfill on any given job. But that's not enough because we're still at the point of having an impact on biodiversity, for instance, having an impact on society, carbon is sorted, but there is an offsetting element within that.

What we want to do is push that forward and say, okay, how can we how can we push the agenda even further, and measure, and qualify all our actions so that we are not doing less harm, but we're actually actively contributing, every day, that we're in operation.

Phil: So you've, you've covered there an awful lot of things that you're doing. Obviously, you've been on this transformational journey and you're absolutely a champion for sustainability and doing good for the planet. Can you tell me how that transformation came about?

Gareth: Yeah. It's a great story, actually, because, I mean, we were a grand old lady of a business. We're not we're not some cool new startup. We're we're 78 years old. Started in Oxford by a couple of guys who came out of the war, and basically the company kept up with technology at the time. And fast forward to the mid 90s, the board before mine, was invited to a seminar and this academic, sort of explained to a roomful of printers and publishers, guys, look, I don't know if you know, but you're responsible for quite some serious damage. We were that point in the mid-nineties, the fifth worst largest manufacturing sector amongst the the fifth largest manufacturing sectors, but the fourth worst environmental polluter. So you’ve got this huge industry that's that's having this effects that I touched upon earlier and the guys weren't comfortable with that. And they came back and they put it to the board and they said, look, we want to do something about it. And at that point, in 1996, we went from a linear business model.

And this is really important. So I'm really pleased you asked me this Phil because it's fundamental, because you have to change your mindset. It's no good. You can't get to where you ultimately want to be if you are basing decisions as a linear business. And what I mean by that is, if your focus is purely on output and profitability, as businesses have been since the Industrial revolution really, what we did at that moment is that we went to a values based business where you give equal weighting to the environment, to society and to profitability. And it was at that time actually that, John Elkington coined Triple Bottom Line Thinking, which subsequently John's rolled back because it's no longer fit for purpose, but without having that specific change and becoming a values based business, you can't make the decisions you need to do. And so in terms of how companies can push the agenda, we all need a sense of ambition. We really do. We need a sense of ambition. What do we want to stand for? What do we want our businesses to stand for? What do we want to go to work for every day? It shouldn't just be about selling more units and making some more money. That is so out of date. And obsolete. What it needs to be is how are we creating value? How are we actually part of something much bigger? We all I'm sure you know, have families and, we all know fundamentally we cannot sustain where we are. We are out consuming our resources so quickly. We need a complete reset. And that dovetails into how we operate our businesses and what we're [procuring ???] based upon. It can't be based upon “we need to get the cheapest stuff into the business to make the most profit”. That's how we got in this mess in the first instance. And so this whole thing about realigning, your business, who are we? What what do we want to stand for? What are we about? You know, and that is such a fundamental position, that that's the biggest thing, that, you know, I can share with anyone is really get that mindset, get that sense of ambition. What do you want to do! You know, come on.

Phil: I love that. And do you know what, I absolutely get your passion from that. Your face is lit up when you're talking to us about that. Your passion is just oozing out of every pore when you're telling us about this mission that you're on, you know, obviously that goes hand in hand with that you have to make a profit. And, you know, you mentioned families. Your families have got to eat, got to pay the mortgage. But, what you're saying is you've got this, this opportunity to not just focus on profit. You're focusing on other things as well, on your impact on the environment and people as well. So it's like those three things that are interlocked and intertwined.

Gareth: It is. But but it's it's in terms of values. I think the challenge is, is that, how do we how do we interpret that value? How can I communicate my value to, to you guys? And likewise, your listeners about their own business? And that comes down to communication. And we need to share our stories, share our successes, and share our journeys. The sustainability movement, the biggest fail in the last 30 years has been the sustainability movement. We all know the problems, but we're still not there. We're still behind the curve on it. And I think a lot of it comes down to us as businesses. How can we how can we get people excited about our own businesses? By sharing these journeys, by sharing your sense of ambition, by declaring to the world, you know, this is who we are, this is what we stand for, and this is why you guys should be working with us. Not because we're on the cheap. It's not because we're the, you know, whatever the previous criteria is, it's because people should get excited about what you do and being part of that journey. And, you know, there's no silver bullet with this stuff. There's just lots and lots and lots and lots of incremental steps. And it is all about the journey.

Phil: Yeah. And I love that because you're talking about stories and as a marketeer, you know, I'm all about the story and, and being able to convey that story and get that message across and just being able to communicate succinctly and that something which will resonate with people is, is really important.

Kate: You know, I love the fact that you're not just jumping on the bandwagon. You know, that passion is amazing and you're not a hipster. You're not sitting opposite me with a goatee beard, and you haven't got a play pool in the office or a Helter Skelter, you know, you listening to that passion, it's come from years of striving to be this way and not a greenwashing company, which unfortunately, there's a lot of greenwashing around, especially in the garden industry. So to hear you talk with passion but also experience. So it's such a positive story Phil.

Phil: Yeah no, it really is. So I've actually visited your, printers in Oxford and what you've got going on there is really impressive. But one thing that's always struck me, and it was it was a few years ago that I went, but it was the wormery that you've got. Can you just tell me about that, because I think that's amazing.

Gareth: Yeah, so not many printers have got a woomera on site, I guess. So as I said, we had our last waste to landfill back in 2009. So ever since then, we have huge amounts of materiality come in and out of our two sites every day. And everything that doesn't make it to clients ends up, in, you know, I think we're up to about 18 recycling streams. Anyway, before we got to this point, we've done so much work and I was like, what is actually going in these bins that are left? I didn't know what was in there. So I had to jump in these bins to find out what was in there. And, what I found was, what I landed in is a is a load of tea bags and a load of, organic waste and fruit scraps and all sorts of things. This is crazy - surely we can do something about this! Which is why one of the team here came up with a right “We need to get a wormery in”. And we got one wormery in and one wormery turned to two and two wormeries turned to four. We got all our tiger worms, which are absolutely epic. Major part of the team. And then what we've done, we've got to a point that we've built this massive, dedicated wormery for them all, And they produce our [sequel Worm Wee?]. And I don't know if you've got given any of this Phil, but basically what we did is from a, and this is typical, you know, what you can do, from a waste product something that was a problem, we created the sequel office allotment kit. Which is we could grow… We gave our clients, dwarf chili seeds along with some of our compost that was generated from our worm resource and our secret worm wee. And then all of a sudden, people that haven't got allotments could start growing their dwarf chili plants on their desks. And those with allotments were getting all our all our secret worm wee - it's not worm wee but, you know, have you using that to power their veggies. And so, we've created this whole secondary thing going on with our community, which is fantastic.

Kate: Is a brilliant story. I love that. I have a wormery myself and they're just brilliant. I don't have a food bin that goes out for collection on the curbside because of the wormery. Excellent. I love that. Back to the garden sector, lots of businesses that work in that industry, think of themselves as, you know, that they're on the right side of the green issues. I think we probably know some of that isn't true. So what questions should the industry, the garden industry be asking themselves with regards to they're quite, quite mammoth printing needs.

Gareth: Regardless of it's printing or anything else within your supply chain, you know, you should be checking, the claims of your of your partners. As I alluded to earlier, for all businesses, scope three, which is, your carbon impacts within your supply chain tend to make up at least 80% of any company's impacts. So this is where all the action is.

If you want as a business to, make a significant improvement and without fundamentally having to re-engineer your business, the first place you should be looking is your supply chain, because it's an easier win. And there are there are people out there that are delivering, absolute value. So any printing company worth their salt what they should be run on renewable energy. There's no excuse not to. They shouldn't be sending any waste to landfill. They should have carbon reduction targets, preferably science based, that charts their, success and their goals. And ideally they would be operating a waterless like we do where we don't use any water, we don't use any chemicals, we don't generate any landfill. And be essentially a B corp and we've been best for the world for the last couple of years by B Corp, which is kind of cool because we're the exemplar of the exemplars.

Phil: Obviously you are a B Corp. I'd like you to explain a little bit more about about that, just for people who've not really aware of what a B Corp is. And I understand that it's actually quite a process to get certified. So can you tell me why you thought it was important to sign up for that and, you know, go through that process?

Gareth: Yeah. So I mean, we've had 20 odd, 30 odd years of accreditations going back to BS5750 and ISOs coming off our ears and EN’s, which is the European equivalent. But all these things were quite separate. And there was there was nothing overarching that encompassed how we felt, business should be done or what business should stand for.

Until I came across B Corps, which, about 5 or 6 years ago started in the States. And B stands for benefit, benefit corporations. And the premise is a simple one. It's going back to my earlier point really about businesses standing for something more than making money, businesses being a values based business, and business being a force for good.

If you fundamentally believe that with your with your heart and with your actions, then you absolutely need to look at B Corps and you absolutely need to get B Corps in your supply chain. Benefit corporations are now around about 6500 I think worldwide. The UK is the fastest growing, adopter of B Corp status. What this does is, is this is a rubber stamp and as you said Phil, it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. They come in, they check the back of the kitchen. They're in your pockets. They will you turn your trousers up and empty. Empty everything out. There is no hiding place. But that's the strength of it. That's the whole point. They look at everything. They look at turn everything inside out from not just an environmental point of view, but from your impact on society. How you look after your colleagues, how you look after your customers, what you stand for and what this is done is it's encapsulating everything. And if you look and think how you would like a business to be, a B Corp will meet that dream, vision that you have.

And so it does take a long time. It is, quite onerous. Yeah. But that rubber stamp, it pulls everything together. All these disparate, policies that a business might have and all this best practice that they might have. You can you can wrap all that up. And this one B Corp logo, this stamp of approval qualifies you. And people know that they can absolutely trust these businesses because they have been through this, this process. And as I said, we're we're incredibly proud. We've been voted best for the world, for the environment, not for printing company, but best for the world, for the environment. So in the top 5% of all B Corp's worldwide in 2022 and 2021 as a printing company, and that goes, we've got four Queen's Awards as well for sustainable development.

So all this stuff, all this, this stuff is just incidental of all of our journey, this incidental outcomes. But it just shows, you know, we're we're just a little business on the side of Oxford just doing our thing. But if you have this vision and if you have this unrelenting determination to not compromise because that really is, it comes back to one of your earlier points Kate, I suppose, is that you cannot compromise on this stuff. If you say this is what you stand for and you are proclaiming this to all your stakeholders, then that is what you should be doing.

Kate: That’s something I didn't know enough about at all. I'd heard the phrase but just, you know, just assumed it was just yet another kind of, yeah, trendy environmental award thing. But this sounds like the OFSTED of the kind of environmental world really for businesses

Gareth: It doesn't it doesn't get any better. Yeah. And, even the people like Waitrose, in B Corp month, they have a whole aisle of products. Now, that we've had this conversation, I hope everyone's listening as well as you guys will start to notice it's a B in a circle and it's on so many products.

Phil: Yeah. As an agency, we're just starting our B corp journey. So as I alluded to and as you've alluded to, it's not easy.

Gareth: It's not easy, but it is unquestionably what needs to happen.

Kate: So lets go back to what you do. Are there any innovations in the pipeline that you are excited about Gareth

Gareth: I'm always excited Kate. Can you not tell this is how I spend my life, in a state of excitement and nervous energy? Well, it was interesting. Well, here's an interesting one for you. In November, just gone. I jumped on the Eurostar along with a couple of colleagues. And we went down into Belgium, down by the border of Luxembourg.

And we've identified the most sustainable paper mill, the most sustainable commercial paper mill in Europe. And we've started working with them. We carried out a big audit, exercise, and we found out that we can reduce the carbon impact of our paper purchasing per year by 18%. We buy a lot of paper, a lot of paper. And so this is massive. And so when I talk about scope three, this is exactly a prime example of how by looking into your supply chain, there's always room for improvement, even for us! You know we've been doing this for a long time. So yeah, we went down there, we met the guys, we went round and we walked the production site. It was absolutely fantastic. What's really super cool is that at the moment, they’re powered by biomass for the majority of it, so chickens that come in from the fell wood and don't forget, with forestry, I'm not a bad guy. Okay. Forestry in Europe grew by 58,300 square km between 2005 and 2020. The equivalent landmass larger than Switzerland. Right. So forestry. It's a carbon sink. It's sustainable. It's a crop. And also the European pulp and paper market is the biggest user and producer of renewable energy in Europe, which is kind of cool. Where these guys are going in terms of their huge paper making plant is they're putting in a vast solar array of about 17,500 PV panels, which is going to mean that the predominant the major force in this huge billion pound operation is being powered by the sun, which is just absolutely fantastic. And so we've already achieved this 18% carbon reduction as it is now, with more coming downstream once this solar farm comes in. So yeah, it's it's really massive and, very exciting.

Phil: It sounds amazing. And I mean, obviously, you know, when you're starting to approach your suppliers, I mean, do you get sort of, are they skeptical about what you're trying to get talk to them about?

Gareth: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I've had interesting conversations when we mapped our supply chain, we were asking questions that nobody has ever asked these people, and they're like, why do you need to know this stuff Gareth? I was like, look, I need to know because I want to know absolutely what our impact is. If you don't know, that's fine. But I will find someone that does and will work with me to reduce this stuff. You have these conversations and all of a sudden things happen. People's mindset changes. People start to understand what's important. You look at look at what happened with plastic bags. I mean, put 3p on a on a plastic bag, look what happens, you change behaviour.

Phil: Absolutely. So are there any misconceptions about the printing industry that you'd like to dispel?

Gareth: Well, I briefly touched on the paper aspect, so. Yeah. So as I said, it's a carbon sink. So it's great forestry. Online doesn't mean that it's environmental free. Quite the reverse. I think there was a study back in the early 2020s by, the Swedish university that said, if you if you read a newspaper over 20 minutes, you're better off reading a printed newspaper as against taking your news online.

Phil: Really? That's staggering.

But if we then qualify that to our situation where we're run with all our panels, we've invented our own printing process that uses no water, no chemicals. We generate no waste to landfill. And we’re carbon negative so we're taking more carbon out of the atmosphere that we're responsible for. I would suggest that that 20 minutes comes tumbling down and all of a sudden, where's the impact?

Phil: Yeah. Well, I absolutely love the tactile nature of print. You know, it's it's something about having something in your hands, being able to turn the pages and read it. And, you know, its so much more of an immersive experience than trying to read something online.

Phil: Absolutely. I was hoping that you wouldn't say, I love the smell of print because that's all the chemicals Phil. So you wouldn't like our print because it doesn't smell.

Kate: That is just just fascinating. I mean because every morning I have my iPad and I read the news and think I'm being good by not buying a newspaper or magazine, you know. And now you’ve just completely kind of shaken my foundation of my beliefs of printing being bad. So I think that is, yes, lot of food for thought and Yes. Wow. I got to sit and digest everything you've been saying and really look into that. So goodness me, just when you think, well, you think you're being good, don't you think you're being green?

Gareth: Absolutely. Well, you do, but no one says about the data centers, that are pulling the equivalent energy the size of the town of Luton.

Kate: Yeah so gardening industries use a lot print. There's a lot of leaflets, instruction manuals, fact sheets, packaging posters, especially when they do lots of events. There's loads of stuff out there. Point of sale catalogs, brochures. What? How would you go about helping the garden industry sector with with all these requirements that they have?

Gareth: Oh, I'd love to. Yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to understand more. A couple of examples of what we've done for, for other clients is, with POS, for instance, we work with a chain of, frozen food, who's also a B Corp. They make beautiful fresh frozen food. They’ve got over 100 stores. And we, sorted out their POS so they no longer use PVC. We ensure that they no longer generate any waste landfill because we close the loop and we take full lifetime ownership of all the materials we produce. So it goes out to the stores, they have the promotion on, and then we arrange to collect that, bring it back, recycle it. So not only are we changing the materials from really bad stuff to really good stuff, but we're taking full ownership so that this stuff does not hit landfill. National trust they've got 500 sites around the UK. They use the banners to advertise the sites. You'll have seen them. We said, please don't do that anymore. Don't use PVC. Don't get it printed badly. Yeah. We can we can change the material. We can print it using our specialist printing. And we can arrange collection again. Closing the loop. No landfill. Got a recipe box card company we work with. We produce nearly a million recipe cards, a week. And I've equated to, was it the carbon saving that they achieve annually is the equivalent of a car driving I think it was 870 times around the world. It's a huge number of carbon, not to mention this, all the water and the chemicals. And so what we're producing is environmental saving sheets that we give to our clients. And this is where the value comes in, is that they can then report that back and take that into their own savings and their own net zero targets. Because obviously we're all working towards net zero. I mean, we were there a few years ago. But now, our position is that we step into our clients and we support them, we understand what they're doing, and we re-engineer how they're doing things so that we can absolutely say, no, no, no, we we can fix this. You probably didn't even know it was a problem in the first place. But we can we can fix this and we can report this good news story that you can, you can share, and put towards your own net zero targets. So there's loads of stuff that we do. Leaflets, all sorts of stuff.

Kate: Good to know because there so may events as well, that they help the garden industry hold that I've been to. And we're great about recycling plants, and all that kind of side of it, but actually the bins at the end of the day are usually overflowing with leaflets and all that kind of thing. So it would be great to start making that change. Definitely. So, going to just change it slightly. Gareth, a question close to my heart. Obviously you have a wormery, which just sounds like the kind of Buckingham Palace of wormerys, but, do you yourself, do you garden? Do you have any interest in, in actually gardening?

Gareth: I do, I do, I've got got a lovely garden which I inherited when we bought the house. It's not looking as good as when we inherited the house, I have to admit. But I do love it. Just pottering away. There's something so, relaxing that I can just, you know, be out in the garden, mow the lawns, just trim the hedges back, just sit.

Reflect. Enjoy. There's lots of blue sky, which is wonderful. And birdsong, which is fantastic. Where I am. So. Absolutely. As soon as it's clear and dry. I love being outside.

Phil: Thank you so much, Gareth, for, joining us this morning. I think the passion that you show for what you do and wanting to do the right thing, for the planet is, is just, amazing. And it really comes across. So I just want to say thank you for that. And hopefully, people will, listen to this and really start questioning what they do about, their printing needs, you know, how they go about it, you know, questioning whether they've got established relationships with printers, you know, asking them what they're doing and that sort of thing. So hopefully it'll really make a difference.

Gareth: And also, yeah, can I just say, because we are, a B Corp, you know, this is really important to us. So I'm sat here in our client lab where we where we get clients in and we talk about their strategic objectives as a business. And so if any of your listeners would like, be interested to, to have a chat, and understand a bit more about B Corp, please do pass my details on more than happy because we want businesses to be doing the right thing. And if there's, support that we can give, we're more than happy to do so.

Phil: Sure. That's fantastic. Yeah, we'll make sure we'll do that. All right.

Thank you both very much.

Kate: It's been eye opening. It really has been eye opening. And yes, very, I hate that the term interesting, and thought provoking, but it really has been and I think would definitely want to pass this on to as many people within this industry, the garden sector, industry, as possible, because we've got a lot to learn. So thank you for, imparting your knowledge, but also in such a non aggressive way as well, which I often find with some of the more environmental kind of businesses. I haven't felt any hostility coming from you, Gareth, at all. It's just been so much positive energy, which is really refreshing as well. So thank you.

Gareth: Phil, Kate, thanks so much. It's been a pleasure to, to talk to you both. Thank you so much.