The Sustainable Green Printing Partnership (SGP) has announced a pilot project to expand its certification program beyond the United States and Canada. SGP has been successfully holding all audits virtually for more than a year. Using this method, the organization can expand internationally, allowing printers and industry suppliers worldwide to achieve SGP certification.

Through its cloud-based SGP Impact Tracker, information for a virtual audit is quickly and effectively shared with SGP’s independent auditors.

“SGP certified facilities must renew their certification every two years,” says Wendy Nadan, SGP lead auditor. “In 2018, SGP released the SGP Impact Tracker. With enhancements, the Tracker provided a virtual audit solution for the current global situation. This inspired us to rethink how we could extend the SGP certification to more distant countries. From the initial planning meeting to the completion of document review, including photographic evidence, can be accomplished through conference calls with the local sustainability team. Each facility can meet the expectations of the audit as if an SGP auditor were physically on-site.”

For more than 10 years, SGP certification has been driving sustainable activities in the printing industry. With its sustainability management system and annual improvement projects, SGP-certified facilities are industry leaders in providing sustainable printing and independent validation of their claims for a sustainable supply chain. SGP certification is given to facilities meeting the rigorous standards of the criteria developed by SGP.

“We believe the flexibility of the virtual audit provides an opportunity for facilities worldwide to validate their sustainability programs through SGP,” adds Marci Kinter, SGP co-founder, SGP Technical Committee chair and Printing United Alliance representative. “SGP has had a number of requests from printers in Asia and Europe to get certified. With the power of our SGP Impact Tracker and our revised certification criteria, SGP will be able to test the feasibility of extending its certification to the worldwide market.”

The SGP certification pilot program will be launched in October 2021 with the next revision of the SGP certification criteria, which is adopted after a public review process every five years. More program details, including the application for pilot testing, will be released in August 2021.