Screen Printing - October/November 2019 - 14

THE MARSHALL PLAN

SUSTAINABILITY
CHALLENGE

Marshall Atkinson is the owner of
Atkinson Consulting, LLC, based
in Mesa, Arizona. He coaches apparel decoration companies on
operational efficiency, continuous
improvement, workflow strategy,
business planning, employee
motivation, management, and
sustainability. He is a frequent
tradeshow speaker, author, and
host of two podcasts, as well as cofounder of the Shirt Lab educational
company. He can be reached at
marshall@marshallatkinson.com.

Going 'green' could save you money. (Yes, really.)
MARSHALL ATKINSON

t's no secret I'm a big fan of implementing a sustainability
program in a business. Years ago, when I moved from the art
director's chair to VP of operations, I found that building a
sustainability program helped me focus on all the right metrics
for evaluating the inner workings of a company.
Efficiency. Cost. Employee training. Error rates. Waste.
Performance. Quality.
It helped me dig into the "why" something was or wasn't
working the way it should. Yet, I see so many companies
in the decorated apparel industry that are operating with
the wrong notion about sustainability. Sure, it's good to go
"green." But why is that important?
I'd love to tell you to do it for the environment. That it's the
right thing to do. Planet Earth needs your help. But sadly, that
isn't going to move many businesses toward that goal.
Saving a truckload of cash will. Are you interested in that?
Most people I know like money. The more of it, the better.
So, let's think about how starting a sustainability program
can work in your favor from a financial perspective. This is a
challenge that's worth taking on, trust me.

GETTING STARTED
Let's get this out of the way. One reason a lot of shops don't
start on the sustainability journey is they believe that it's going to cost them money. A good sustainability program works
when it's all-encompassing in your business. It's in your DNA.
But that isn't how you start. You start by identifying the easiest ways you can do something differently. Measure how you
do it now, change something, and then measure the result.
Was it better?
For example, let's say you want to move your shop into
becoming completely paperless. Currently, you go through
about three cases of office paper a month. You can get these
for about $32 a case, so that's $1152 a year.
But, you spend a lot of money printing that paper and
walking it around, not to mention storing it later. It goes
in job jackets, the work orders travel from department to
department by someone carrying them, and occasionally,
they get lost, or some other problem occurs.
What if you measured how many minutes per day you're
spending lugging paper around? Let's say that in a shop of 10
people, they spend an average of an hour a day doing this. So,
while the average American wage is $27.11 per hour - that
seems high for our industry - let's use $20 for the example:
1 hour ($20) x 261 (number of workdays in 2019) = $5220.
14

SCREENPRINTING

So, for our example, that's $1152 + $5220 = $6372.
But what about the cost of the technology? You can get a
small computer tablet between $60 and $300 just about anywhere. Let's meet in the middle and call it $180. Ten tablets
(one for each employee) x $180 = $1800.
By not printing that paper, and going digital, this shop
could save an estimated average of $4572 per year.
Remember, this is just one aspect of running the business.
This is why starting a sustainability program is so effective in
reducing costs, as it makes you examine the "why" you are
doing something.

LOOK TO YOUR CONSUMABLES
To quote my friend Greg Kitson, of Mind's Eye Graphics
(mindseyeg.com): "People don't know what they don't know."
You operate your shop and use that brand of ink, emulsion,
thread, shrink wrap, chemical, or another consumable because
someone made a decision a long time ago. For years, you've
been placing repeat orders for the supplies "just because"
that's what you always do.
Every one of your suppliers seeks to improve their
product line on a continual basis. They have teams of smart
people working night and day to create new products, too.
You may even have some of these new products sitting
there on a shelf, unopened, unused, untested.
As my supplier friends in the industry often lament, one
of the biggest challenges in developing these new products is
simply getting shops to try them.

SOUND FAMILIAR?
As someone who has managed this process, please be sure
you're using the products correctly. Plenty of people blame
the item for non-performance, but if you take a closer look,
the item wasn't being used correctly. This is true, especially
with ink or emulsion.
Sustainability thrives on three tenets: Reduce, reuse,
and recycle.
For consumables, let's look at reducing the amount we
use, and talk about ink in particular.
As I mentioned, many shops are quick to blame the ink
as underperforming. You see this all the time, especially in

http://www.mindseyeg.com

Screen Printing - October/November 2019

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