Renee Yardley – Rolland Inc.

Sustainability will continue to be important for organizations big and small in the year ahead. Consumers across industries are demanding that the brands they buy make strides in sustainability. As 2020 nears, here are three valuable sustainability trends to watch.

The circular economy will continue gathering steam

This year, it was hard to ignore headlines about landfills and the United States – at under five per-cent of the world’s population, the U.S. produces 20 per-cent of the world’s trash. Increasingly, consumers are getting fed up with the old “produce, use, discard” model.

Industry-wide initiatives aimed at boosting recycling and product re-use are increasingly emerging, in response to consumer demand for purpose-driven organizations that build sustainability into their products and services. The Ellen MacArthur foundation, for example, has organized a pledge whereby companies including DS Smith and H&M have partnered with governments to create more circular processes.

For our part, we’ve embraced a closed-loop manufacturing process, using post-consumer recycled content from the “urban forest,” for new paper products that are still recyclable. Rolland has also had success investing in circular innovations, such as biogas energy and water treatment systems that reuse water to minimize waste.

Measurement, in your business and within the businesses of the partners you work with, is critical to achieving circularity. For example, we conducted a Life Cycle Assessment to measure our environmental impact and help our customers better understand how we incorporate sustainability into every part of our process.

Gen Z will continue to demand action

As the October demonstrations show, young consumers are demanding change and driving much of the conversation around sustainability – and holding brands accountable. A McKinsey study found that 90 per-cent of gen Z expects brands to take a responsible approach to environmental and social issues.

This mentality will continue to push brands to innovate and create higher standards for sustainable processes. Gen Z and millennials together account for around $350 billion in spending power in the U.S and gen Z alone will make up 40 per-cent of global consumers by 2020.

Companies are already responding to this demand with action. Some of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods companies are rethinking how they package products to incorporate post-consumer materials. This includes Nestle recently launching new recyclable paper wrappers for its YES! snack bars, among others.

Technology is transforming supply chain management

Pressure from consumers and regulators is also creating demand for greater supply chain transparency. Because of that, new technology is emerging to help companies shift to leaner, but also more responsible, supply chains.

IBM, for example, recently launched IBM Food Trust. It uses blockchain technology to create shared records of food system data, to create more transparency among all parts of the supply chain. Along with being more efficient, it also aims to improve food safety and help brands build trust with consumers. Nestle, Unilever and Walmart, among others, have all signed on to the platform already.

With a new year around the corner, it’s a great time to reflect on how businesses can make a positive societal impact for the future. As you set new objectives and decide which initiatives and partnerships to invest in, remember that the demand for sustainability isn’t slowing down any time soon and that responsible product sourcing could be a means of competitive advantage in 2020.

Source: Freeport Press

With Baby Boomers staying in the workforce longer and Gen Z being the first “fully digital” generation at work, B2B marketers have a tricky challenge. Effectively marketing across five generations – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Gen Y and Gen Z – means taking a strategic approach to multi-channel campaigns and content.

“We live in a multi-channel world with digitally connected devices that are always on. We receive marketing messages, ads, and alerts from many platforms, devices, apps, and websites,” writes Lois Ritarossi in Printing Impressions. “There are five generations in the workforce making buying decisions for consumer and B2B products and services. Marketers must define and deploy omnichannel strategies to engage with their various customer segments in the channels the customers prefer for different types of communications.”

Those customer preferences may seem obvious – digital natives want everything digital, and Boomers hate smartphones, right? The reality is digital natives often long for human and tactile interactions. They appreciate unplugging away from work hours and recognize the downside of too much time on social media.  And Baby Boomers are embracing technology to help stay connected and in touch.

Meanwhile, Millennials have a real fondness for print, especially when the information “matters.”

This multi-generational and cross-channel reality means marketers are once again embracing traditional media like printed magazines, catalogs and direct mailers that may have been considered obsolete when digital natives started making up more and more of the workplace.

“Great print and well-designed catalogs and direct mail create engagement and demand attention that drives e-commerce sales,” Ritarossi writes. “Retailers are using demographic and spending data to optimize when to send catalogs and direct mail focusing on key times such as holidays, life events — such as moving — or targeted direct mail for abandoned e-commerce shopping carts that spur spending.”

It’s beyond question that technology has changed how we communicate with and engage our B2B audiences. What hasn’t changed? The fact that we are all humans, with an innate attraction to the real and the tangible. This is the reality of marketing today, no matter what generation you aim to attract.

From: FastCompany || STEPHANIE VOZZA

We’re living in a digital world—one where screens dominate our time. The average American adult spends three hours and 43 minutes on mobile devices, according to 2019 research by eMarketer. This doesn’t include the time spent on a computer at work or parked in front of the television at home.It’s easy to find an app or software platform to help you do run your life, making paper and pen feel old-school. But paper products offer advantages that tech does not. Here are five times when you should choose analog over digital:

Renée Yardley
May 15, 2019

All over the world, organizations in every industry are looking for ways to operate in more sustainable ways. At the same time, our landfills continue to overflow.

But this environmental challenge has the potential to actually power sustainability. We prove it every day at Rolland, by using biogas.

Why we turned to biogas

When you think about how paper can be more environmentally friendly, most people immediately think about recycling it. But it comes down to how it’s produced, too.

To us, true sustainability means making sure our entire manufacturing process takes the environment into account, from start to finish – in turn, giving our customers more confidence that the paper they use has a minimal environmental impact. That includes using energy in a way that’s clean, sustainable and renewable, which is why we’ve used biogas since 2004.

A key part of our Sustainability Strategy is our belief in a closed-loop future, where our products are made from recycled materials and can continue to be made into new products after they’re used. This philosophy is also the heart of biogas itself, because biogas energy comes from reuse of materials: from garbage.

In our case, using biogas starts at a nearby landfill, where methane from decomposing waste is captured, preventing it from being released into the air. Then, it’s purified, compressed and transported through a dedicated eight-mile pipeline, ultimately meeting 93 per cent of our paper mill’s thermal needs.

How biogas takes us from problem to solution

Unlike traditional fossil fuels, biogas is a renewable energy source, because it comes from converting organic materials that are continually produced but would otherwise go unused because they’re sitting in a landfill.

Fossil fuels, on the other hand, come from drilling far into the ground for organic material that once used up, won’t return. Biogas is also considered carbon neutral, because the CO2 that comes from burning it as fuel has already been extracted from the environment during the organism’s lifecycle.

As Pascal Meunier, Rolland’s Environmental Manager, has put it, the choice to use biogas at Rolland was based on it being available, but also the fact that it could be harmful to the environment if it is not recovered. “When methane, the main component of biogas is emitted into the atmosphere, it’s a powerful greenhouse gas 25 times greater than CO2,” he says. “By not using biogas, greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas extraction would end up being higher.”

Renewable energy like biogas is critical in the fight against climate change. In the United States alone, nearly 40 per cent of CO2 pollution comes from fossil fuels. In short, it’s much better for preserving our environment for years to come – a passion point for us at Rolland.

“Energy management is built into our core strategy,” says Pascale Vachon, Rolland’s Corporate Vice President, EH&S and Quality, “and biogas, like use of post-consumer recycled materials, plays a key role in our manufacturing process in keeping the environmental footprint of our products as small as possible.”

Results for the environment, the economy and our customers

Indeed, using biogas allows us to curb our CO2 emissions by 70,000 tons – the equivalent of 23,400 compact cars – every single year.

It’s in part because of biogas that Rolland’s Enviro product line also has less than half of the environmental impact compared to the North American paper industry average, as our Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) reveals. Specifically, its impact on climate change is an impressive 62 per cent lower than other papers in North America, also with lower human health impacts throughout its entire life cycle, in terms of toxicity and contribution to respiratory effects.

Beyond this, the benefits of using biogas extend to the local economy: Before turning waste into biogas, the landfill operator we partner with wasn’t getting any value from the excess materials in the landfill and didn’t have the reliable revenue stream that comes from turning it into biogas.

“Biogas is an economical alternative to burning natural gases, especially for residue landfills which would have otherwise been burned,” explains Pierre-Michel Raymond, Rolland’s Mechanical Engineer and Energy Supervisor. “Plus, a utility operates the pipeline and all parties receive revenue as part of the Rolland supply chain.”

Even putting those positive social impacts aside, biogas has also proven to be good business for Rolland. Using biogas allowed us to drop our plant’s thermal costs by 35 per cent in the first year of biogas use. Clearly, using renewable energy has not only set us up for environmental success, but for long-term business success, too.

We’ve long held the belief that responsible purchasing and product use involves the entire product lifecycle. With energy management and closing the loop being core to our Sustainability Strategy, biogas has become integral to our business.

By using biogas, we’re helping our customers gain confidence that the paper they use came from a process with a limited impact on the environment. In turn, this supports a path to their own lower environmental impact and to a more sustainable, closed-loop future.