Metafore Award - Spicers helps the enviroment

Spicers, Metafore Award finalists

  Portland, OR. - Metafore, a non-profit that helps align day-to-day business practices so they achieve desired social, environmental and financial results has announced that Spicers Paper was a finalist in its inaugural Metafore Innovation Award.

  Spicers Paper, which is a division of PaperlinX, developed a custom sheeting program that judges called “a real innovative approach to reducing waste while meeting customers needsâ€�.

Representating Spicers, at the Award presentation, was Tom Liotta and Andrew Jackson representing PaperlinX.

The Perfect Form

By investing in technology to maximize paper usage, Spicers Paper aligns financial and environmental outcomes by Angie Marsh

When Spicers Paper Inc. looked to differentiate itself among its printer customer base in 1994, it chose the route that was not littered with excess paper waste.

What, they asked, combines cost savings and natural resource efficiency?

They found a service differentiator that stretches the value of paper—a process known as custom sheeting, where exact cuts are made to meet exact paper sizes.

For Spicers, changing its scope of how paper is cut to size presented an opportunity to position itself as an efficient business that valued conservation.

“We continually remind the industry ‘Custom sheeting reduces your waste. It’s good for the environment and good for your business.’ Though this was a non-traditional approach to sheeting, it made environmental and economic sense,� says Tom Liotta, Spicers business manager of corporate accounts. “We had really been asking—and examining—why printing was resulting in so much wasted paper, and wanted to emphasize waste reduction.�

Business in the printing industry is typically characterized by stock paper in sizes configured for standard design layouts that are multiples of 8½ x 11. For a layout other than this standard, paper is wasted when the printer formats the job on the press. In traditional printing, this trim waste is discarded without ever being used, which  carries added costs for a business and its customers. Moreover, it fails to maximize the value of products derived from the world’s forests.

To counter this effect, Spicers uses what it calls the “Squeeze Principle� of custom sheeting, where a master roll of paper is cut to the exact dimensions of the desired product, duly “squeezing� more copies together and maximizing the sheets’ printable area.

As a result, Spicers’ custom sheeting has led to significant cost savings for its business operations, and its customers who no longer have to pay for unused paper. This means the real value of paper is more fully realized as more goes into a final product and less to waste.

Spicers’ approach allows customers—who typically pay for a paper job by weight—to pay only for the actual paper that is used, unlike traditional methods, where they pay for the scrap as well. With the popularity of digital printing and uniquely sized business materials, high performance on smaller sheet sizes is at the top of the priority list of many potential custom sheet customers.

But while there is a cost and environmental savings with custom sheeting, Spicers had to invest to make this innovative approach a reality. According to Liotta, Spicers allocated more than $25 million to start up the program, which began in Australia and expanded by installing st