Published by Martha Danly under Sustainability, Sustainable Products

It wasn’t my intention, but this is turning into Bamboo Week at Green by Design.

First came the PlybooPure story; then fun facts about bamboo. I keep running into more fascinating uses for this genius of a grass. This time it’s bamboo paper and letterpress printing—with a deeply ecological twist.

Transport yourself for a moment to upstate New York—where a onetime John Deere Factory on Syracuse’s downtown west side is now known as the Delavan Center. Picture an old, sprawling warehouse in a gritty post-industrial town. Among the potters, painters, photographers, and sculptors who work there, you will find Smock.

Smock is the first and only print shop in the U.S. that prints on bamboo paper. Their paper is no rag-tag, funkadelic foolscap made in somebody’s bathtub. It’s luxury, artisan paper that Smock touts as the ‘prettiest’ paper on the market.

Unlike the cotton paper used almost exclusively by letterpress print shops today, bamboo paper is made from a truly sustainable resource. Conventional cotton is non-sustainable on many fronts, one of which is the debt that its production owes to agrochemicals. To grow cotton requires the use of more chemicals than any other crop on Earth—accounting for fully one-quarter of the insecticides deployed worldwide, and 10% of pesticides.

While bamboo paper is the headline of the Smock story, the company’s approach to running a green business goes much further. Looking at all of Smock’s business practices, from sourcing to waste reduction (using a basic lifecycle analysis), I can see an industry leader worth following. In order to illustrate the depth of their commitment to ecologically sustainable design, let’s examine how this company does business.

Design. The first thing that grabs the attention is the visual style of Smock’s creative director and designer, Amy Graham Stigler. Her designs incorporate a remarkable mix of styles, reflecting her study of art history as well as inspiration taken from the favorites listed in her bio—”silver engraving, vintage wallpapers, slightly overblown flowers, and old envelopes.”

Most important, each design conveys a sense of place that invokes Amy’s Midwestern roots. The vibrant yet elegant appeal of her approach brings to the viewer’s eye the immediacy of Smock’s whole message. Browsing the company’s wedding invitations, holiday cards, and thank-you notes, I’m intrigued to discover who these people are; their background story, their philosophy, the underpinnings of their green sensibility.

Check out their website and you’ll see what I mean. No amount of bamboo paper and eco-friendly inks would matter if the design bones weren’t so compelling.

Paper. Smock uses organic bamboo harvested in Thailand, supplied by farmers whose land has escaped conversion from natural forest to plantation. Being organic, their operation is non-GMO and their bamboo is sustainably grown without pesticides or fertilizers.

Printing. Smock uses a letterpress printer, the kind Johannes Gutenberg invented in the 13th Century. To call their printing process old-fashioned would understate the point! The cast-iron printer demands real craft on the part of its operator, but the man-machine interaction yields a final product that Smock appropriately deems “heavy with human warmth and uniqueness.”

Smock makes the process sustainable by printing with vegetable oil-based inks only, ones with low-Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). Likewise, solvents are low-VOC and citrus-based.

Packaging. The green configuration extends to their retail packaging, which is biodegradable, tree-free, and petroleum-free. They go so far as to place their custom work in keepsake boxes made from 100% post-consumer recycled materials.

Recycling. Dedication to recycling prevails from the printroom floor to the break room and offices. Smock gives darkroom chemicals, film, paper offcuts, and photopolymer printing plates a second chance; the same goes for ink cans and old rags.

As you might expect, food waste from the break room is composted. Surplus paper and envelopes are donated to local public schools. No muda (an honorable Japanese term for waste), here!

Power. Wind power supplied by the firm Native Energy drives the business, and Smock takes it one step further toward zeroing out their carbon footprint by planting trees through the Conservation Fund’s Go Zero program. There’s a lot of conscious effort and commitment in their one-year, three-year, and five-year goals for sustainability.

Community. Smock is a very generous contributor on both local and global levels. The list of organizations they support reads like a Who’s Who of the green movement. They donate 1% of sales to the Amazon Conservation Association and Pesticide Action Network (via the organization called 1% for the Planet), and they partner with American Forests and 41 pounds to plant more trees and reduce paper use.

Listen to the way Smock describes itself:

‘Who are we? We are faithful lovers of historic craft. We have letterpress ink in our veins. We are idealists. This means we believe in things. We are trying to make the world better right now. This affects everything we do. We read Walt Whitman (he was a letterpress printer too, by the way) (Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine). We fall head over heels for heavy cast-iron presses. We believe in the creation of beautiful things. And we want, like you, to feel good about where our beautiful things come from.’

Any company that quotes Walt Whitman on its About Us page gets my attention. Thought I’d share this great find with you.