"Printer Closes Loop"

by Beth Regula-Thompson

American Lithographers of Sacramento not only prints the CalMAX catalog, it's also an active participant in the CalMAX program. The print shop has a recurring production need for small pieces of wood to use as end boards for wrapping pallets to keep the printed material from becoming mangled by the pallet wrapper. The perfect situation would be for customers to send the end boards back to the print shop for reuse, but unfortunately this is not a perfect world and that rarely happens.

In the past, American Lithographers purchased these end boards brand new and paid to have them cut to size. Then along came CalMAX and Jim Anderson, the print shop manager, was able to secure an exchange through a listing he placed in the catalog. He found end boards that had already been through one manufacturer's warehouse. In this way, American Lithographers is able to purchase a needed feedstock from another company that may have just been disposing of it, at a significant price break. Landfill, resource, and financial savings all in one!

American Lithographers also purchases and uses paper that is made with up to 100 percent recycled materials, often with a large percentage of postconsumer waste. Only one type of feedstock cannot be made from recycled paper, and that is a specialized white paper. Jim Anderson reports that in the past he had felt that the quality of the productions made with recycled paper were not as good as with virgin materials. Today, American Lithographers no longer has any qualms about using recycled paper for their productions. The high degree of technological progress that ha s been made in the production of recycled paper and the improvements in the quality over the past decades has assured Jim Anderson that publications no longer suffer from recycled content paper. In fact, many customers prefer it.

And besides using recycled paper and reused end boards, American Lithographers is owned by Smurfit, one of California's major paper recyclers. It's entirely possible that some of the paper that Smurfit picks up and recycles from you will be remade into your next CalMAX catalog. That is what's called closing the loop. Congratulations American Lithographers!

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Last updated: August 01, 2008