Sustainability – The Elephant in All Our Rooms

Reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing processes in the ID & secure document industry is a critical societal issue that is, rightly, attracting a lot of management attention. To help address this issue by creating a non-competitive environment for industry players to share learnings, Reconnaissance International (RI) ran a seminar to encourage sharing of best practice as part of the recent High Security Printing™ (EMEA) conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

The seminar, co-ordinated by John Winchcombe (RI), saw representatives from the Mint of Finland, Koenig & Bauer, SICPA, KURZ and G+D give concrete examples of how they are taking practical steps to reduce the impact on the environment from their industrial processes.

MagVision and The Hut Group (THG) expanded the focus of the discussions to include examples of sustainability initiatives for the industry that went beyond process changes that could yield additional benefits to organisations’ sustainability commitments.

There was also a session within the seminar that looked at technologies that might help the industry to navigate a course through what will only become more stringent regulation and legislation. Trustwise, Augentic and GreenToken by SAP gave accounts of how distributed ledger technologies are already helping companies to comply with statutory obligations.

The issue of sustainability is a major threat to the prospects of the whole of the high security printing industry and society at large so participants appreciated being part of a non-competitive honest forum for debate. RI is planning a series of forums to tackle the issue, starting with the first one scheduled to be Cash & Payments Sustainability Forum in Edinburgh, Scotland, 15-16 November 2022.

cashandpaymentsustainabilityforum.com