Greenline Print is a graded ecolabel and online platform for life cycle carbon footprinting of printed products. It's targeted for publishers, printers and the general public, and caters for climate-conscious decision-making in the printing industry.

The Greenline Print  online platform calculates life cycle carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the entire cradle-to-gate production chain of a printed product, provides suggestions for achieving a smaller footprint and issues an easily communicable label that can be printed on the print product.

The online platform consists of a public database and a dedicated calculator for registered users. The carbon information is communicated via graded carbon labels and a unique ID that is stored in the public database, providing details about the grade and emissions of the labelled product. The actual printing can be done in any printing plant, if they have joined our database.

To support and create the image of a sustainable and responsible, innovative company. Not only will Greenline Print publish your carbon emissions stats for your readers to see, but it will enable you to choose your footprint by selecting papers and printers with the lowest emissions.

This is literal – different inputs yield different emissions. Printers operate with different raw materials and efficiency. Currently, the calculator enables publishers to choose their preferred type of paper and gives suggestions on similar papers with smaller emissions. In the future, clients can choose printers that yield the lowest emissions.

You can read more about this in the Method section. In short, we employ a PAS 2050 standard to account for the cradle-to-gate life cycle emissions of producing a print product. We have acquired data from all stakeholders in the production chain; in case of unavailable data, best available data from credible scientific resources are used.

PAS 2050:2011 is a specification for the assessment of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services, issued by the British Standards Institution. Cradle-to-gate life cycle greenhouse gas emissions in the Greenline Print platform have been calculated according to this specification.

ISO 16759:2013 is a standard that provides a specification for the assessment of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services. Cradle-to-gate life cycle greenhouse gas emissions in the Greenline Package platform have been calculated according to this specification. It is further development of PAS 2050 and ISO 14067.

Carbon dioxide equivalency is a quantity that describes, for a given mixture and amount of greenhouse gas, the amount of CO2 that would have the same global warming potential (GWP), when measured over a specified timescale (generally, 100 years). There are various other greenhouse gases, e.g. methane and nitrous oxide, which have a global warming potential of 25 and 298 times that of carbon dioxide of equivalent mass. Let's say a factory emitted 1 tonne of CO2 and 1 tonne of methane; it's carbon footprint would thus be 1x1 + 1x25 = 26 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

To get climate-related information about how publishers produce the print products that you read. For example, by typing in the label ID on the front page, you will be directed to a page with easy-to-read statistics and data about resource consumption for that exact product. If you have a personal carbon budget, you can view what is influencing the footprint of the print products and how much you would need to compensate.

Our carbon calculation method is adopted from the latest PAS 2050 standard (2011 version) by the British Standards Institution. The standard does not allow to omit any processes or emissions in the production chain, unless they account for less than 1% of total emissions. Carbon offsetting is also not permitted. The PAS 2050 standard is a publicly available specification providing a method for verifiable and transparent assessment of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services. Our methods for calculating and grading are described in detail and are open for public access in the Method section.

It is prohibited by the PAS 2050 standard due to lack of transparency and regulation regarding offsets. Carbon offsets have been criticised due to low-quality offset projects that have not delivered and also because they might give the false assumption that printing and producing raw materials is carbon neutral.

It was initiated by Kroonpress Ltd., which is one of the largest and modern printing press plants in the Baltic region. There are three key drivers that lead to the establishment of Greenline Print:

1) industrial production places a burden on the environment and climate, so measures had to be taken to diminish the environmental footprint,

2) society demands environmental action from polluters and producers along with transparent information about claimed environmental improvements,

3) supply chain stakeholders have taken great steps in improving their environmental performance and it is the printing houses that need to communicate these efforts as they are the last in the production pipeline.

No, and inviting a new printer is just a matter of a click. You can request your preferred printer to join the database by having it fill out a form. The form will automatically be submitted to us, so you won’t have to worry about it.

Yes, but we will just have to confirm that you have the required data to be fully qualifiable. You can find the form for new printers here.

In terms of paper vs digital, websites are hosted on servers which use electricity and so does your digital device. Both of them also used up resources during manufacturing. Various studies have shown that, depending on the energy sources used for electricity consumption, staying online for more than 30 minutes can create a larger carbon footprint than ordering a printed publication.

If you're into saving the environment, try collecting your prints. All paper and wood products are carbon carriers, so by holding on to them, you are sequestering carbon! A-grade prints have such low carbon footprints that the carbon contained inside them effectively makes them carbon negative! Brings a whole new meaning to "saving paper", doesn't it?

Another thing to consider is that new-growth forests accumulate more carbon dioxide than old-growth forests. If forest managers stopped harvesting and replanting, the carbon budget of these forests would actually decrease in comparison to sustainably managed forests.

It means that the emissions assessment takes into account everything from the extraction of raw materials to producing intermediary products to transportation and final product consumption. The assessment boundary for printed products ends with the „gate“ which is the publisher's address.

The downstream processes not included in our assessment are usage and end-of-life for which we have no control over. For example, the distribution emissions for each publisher are hard to determine, as are the waste collection and disposal emissions, not to mention the lack of data regarding disposal – be it storage, incineration, landfilling or recycling. On average, the emissions from waste distribution and handling are offset by the carbon that remains contained in the paper that is landfilled or recycled. Thus, even in a cradle-to-cradle assessment, not all of the carbon contained in the paper is released back into the atmosphere. Source: link.

A short answer is that this is possible whenever the natural tree life cycle of capturing carbon dioxide and releasing it after degradation is intercepted and prolonged. Here’s a description of the main end-of-life management options and their footprints:

Burning paper is almost carbon neutral because the main ingredient in paper is biomass – thus, the emissions from burning are offset by the captured carbon dioxide from when the paper fibre was a tree.

Landfilling usually includes methane production from the anaerobic digestion of paper fibre. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, but most papers contain a variable amount of groundwood fibre which contains lignin which does not digest, preventing or slowing down the anaerobic digestion of these papers. Thus, this step could also be carbon-negative due to the carbon that stays in the paper. If the landfill captures biogas for energy production, then this can also be regarded carbon-negative.

Recycling has a carbon negative footprint because the carbon in the paper is not released into the atmosphere, but is reprocessed and can be reused up to six times. In this case, the given paper will be carbon negative for the first years and turn carbon neutral after the six cycles.

Storing printed products in a dry place for an infinite period will have the largest carbon negative footprint, since the carbon dioxide captured by the tree is not released back into the atmosphere as would happen under natural circumstances. It could be argued that if the print product has a smaller carbon footprint than is the carbon dioxide equivalent contained within the product (which is already the case for most of the A-grade papers), storing print products could be an effective way of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere!

The cradle-to-gate life cycle carbon emissions are calculated per tonne of material consumed, including paper waste and other materials that don’t end up in the final product. If the total emissions per tonne are lower than 1000 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent, the grade for the product is A, if emissions are within 1000 and 2000 kg, the product is graded B and anything beyond that is graded C through F in the same 1000 kg steps, until 6000 kg/tonne. The „+“-sign is awarded to orders that use paper that contains recycled fibre.

The ranges are fixed in proportion to the A-class, which is the rough average of carbon dioxide embodied in one tonne of paper (depending on the paper, the embodied carbon amounts from 800 to over 2000 kgCO2 per tonne, whereas the upper limit for emissions on an A-class print is 1000 kgCO2/tonne), which means that A-class prints are statistically more likely to be carbon neutral or carbon negative. Digital media cannot become carbon neutral, not to mention carbon negative, because digital media does not have a carbon-sequestering capacity, unlike paper. This, in turn, makes the A-class prints most sustainable and desirable.