FuturePrint Podcast
FuturePrint is dedicated to and passionate about the power of print technology to enable new opportunities and create new value. This pod features deep-dive discussions with the people behind the tech as well as market analysis, trends, marketing and storytelling!
FuturePrint Podcast
#246 Ink, Innovation and Impact: How Nazdar’s CTO is Driving Sustainable Transformation
In this episode, we speak with Evan Benbow, Chief Technology Officer at Nazdar Ink Technologies, about how he’s steering one of the world’s leading ink manufacturers into a more sustainable future—one practical step at a time.
With a background in energy storage and chemistry, Benbow brings a fresh perspective to the print industry. He explains how his early work with batteries and carbon films prepared him for the complexities of ink formulation, where fluid dynamics, pigment dispersion, and material behavior intersect.
Now at Nazdar, Benbow is leading initiatives that combine scientific rigor with environmental responsibility. From launching the company’s “Nazdar Cares” program to implementing small but impactful changes—like upgrading irrigation systems and rethinking pallet recycling—he’s fostering a culture of curiosity and data-driven improvement.
He shares insights into solvent reclamation efforts, the adoption of EcoVadis sustainability ratings, and the challenges of reducing Scope 3 emissions—those hidden but significant environmental costs embedded in supply chains and product lifecycles.
Benbow also discusses the future of ink innovation, including reformulating UV-curable inks to meet new health and safety standards without compromising performance.
What emerges is a picture of leadership grounded in pragmatism and a commitment to long-term impact. “You’re not trying to compete with the biggest players,” Benbow says. “You’re trying to be better than you were last year.”
If you’re in print, manufacturing, or simply interested in practical sustainability, this conversation offers inspiration and actionable ideas from a leader who’s walking the talk.
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FuturePrint TECH: Industrial Print: 21-22 January '26, Munich, Germany
Welcome to the FuturePrint Podcast celebrating print technology and the people behind it.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the latest episode of the FuturePrint Podcast. Marcus Timpson here, really happy to have with me Evan Bembo, who is the newly appointed CTO of NASDAQ, and welcome to Futureprint podcast.
Speaker 3:Thanks, marcus, appreciate the invitation.
Speaker 2:Congratulations also on the promotion. That's fantastic news. Just on that, really. I guess, as we always like to start before we get into the focus of the theme of the talk, which is going to be around sustainability, your role as CTO obviously covers quite a wide range. Before we even get to that, maybe could you give us a little introduction. You know about yourself, your background, your professional life, maybe before you got to NASDAQ, and what it is you do at NASDAQ yeah, so, uh it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'm a chemist by training. You know, I went to uh Iowa State University for my undergraduate, got a degree in chemistry. I actually didn't know that I would be a chemist going into university, but it's one of those things that you kind of, as you go through the different courses, chemistry kind of spoke to me in a way you know. So I seemed like I understood the language. So, yeah, I transitioned to that. I tried chemical engineering, but I couldn't even get past the first day of running over the syllabus so I was like, well, chemical engineering isn't for me. So I ended up in, yeah that. So I continued on my education at Florida State University.
Speaker 3:I'm specializing in inorganic material so kind of the rest of the periodic table rather than just that top corner that the organic people focus on and did some additional work at University of Connecticut and that's kind of where I had transitioned into sort of an energy storage field. I wasn't 100% clear when I was taking the job what I was getting into, but yeah, so that took me on a journey into energy storage and after that time I had the difficult challenge of transitioning from academia to industry and so I had worked for a couple energy storage startups doing some really interesting technology around either mobile energy storage or, you know, such as ultra capacitors or even large stationary energy storage, which is going very popular these days, obviously with the you know low cost battery that's coming on the marketplaces today. So, yeah, I did that for about five odd, some odd years in industry and stuff like that. But obviously, working in startups it's very engaging and fun and it's always lots of good challenges to solve, but also, at the same time, it's hard to plan a family around that kind of environment as well and you're always you know where's that next. Uh, you know seed funding coming from to keep keep you going and stuff like that. So I had lined up some jobs within more, I guess, traditional industry at the time and, uh, the job I'd lined up eventually got. I got frozen out of because of the company was going to go through a merger, slash, acquisition, so it left me with a new.
Speaker 3:I had to start looking for a new role and that's where I came across the ink industry. You know, to me it's one of those industries you don't know is there until you actually get engaged upon it. I think we take print for granted for sure, just because in general you can do it at home. It seems simple, but obviously it's very complicated. But yeah, so I review in the job description and you know, I kind of checked off a lot of the boxes, except for graphic arts experience. So I was like, hey, that's not bad. Six out of seven sort of the requirements, this is worth a flyer and so sort of the rest is kind of history.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I did that, since about you know, I joined the ink industry in about, uh, 2015 or so, um, yeah, fantastic and and since then I think you've got you've probably got well versed, I think, with the printing industry in that in that space of time, and obviously you've moved into the role of c to. The theme of this discussion is going to be around sustainability. But what is your area For a CTO? Does it mean you're spending a lot of time innovating, developing new things, as well as managing the existing product portfolio? What does a CTO kind of do?
Speaker 3:Well, I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out myself a little bit too. You know it's a few days into this thing, but yeah, in terms of my traditional role, yeah, it's, you know, trying to drive innovation Either A, you know, helping us land new customers and stuff like that. So pushing the portfolio into new areas we haven't been. Some of it is managing your existing portfolio and that is definitely a challenge, I would say, for us and in general the ink industry. For the last you know 10, I'll say 10 some odd years um, especially with your existing portfolio.
Speaker 3:A lot of our uv materials, so nasdaq is very heavy in uv. Even my previous employers were um, but there's been a lot of change in the hazard classifications of our materials and such and uh. It requires sometimes reformulation of product lines that have existed for 20 or 30 years and while it's, it feels great to update those and provide safer formulations, it's also a very dangerous time because then you're you don't 100 always know what your ink does for that customer. You know what you designed it for, but inevitably there are some characteristics that someone has latched onto that makes it really successful. And if you don't know that, sometimes what makes it interesting to customers. It can be a very difficult time to transition those customers to upgraded you know, upgraded formulations and stuff like that for compliance purposes. Um, so that definitely is, I would say, a big challenge that I think not just NASCAR has but everyone in the industry has is dealing with these um reclassifications of our materials and such.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and, and I guess can, and that leads us nicely into talking about what we're going to be talking about um further in this um discussion around sustainability. You mentioned in thanks for that, but you mentioned in your, you know, explanation of how you arrived perhaps in the printing industry, at NASDAQ, around your experience in kind of energy storage and what was the connection that led you, I guess, from casting carbon films to formulate an ink, and how's this shaped perhaps your your approach to sustainability at NASDAQ, because that is something you lead at NASDAQ, sustainability, isn't it, which is a huge job in itself. So, yeah, just how's that connect energy storage to ink manufacturing and sustainability?
Speaker 3:energy storage to ink manufacturing and sustainability. How's that? Yeah, you know, it is one of those things. That is, uh, interesting is, you know, obviously you think of energy storage, all we think of is a battery. But in reality, you know, you, if you take apart a battery which I highly do not recommend, especially a lithium ion battery, do not ever try to take apart because those will be flammable um, but yeah, at the end of the day, you are, you know, playing with pigments carbon black for the most case sometimes inorganic materials.
Speaker 3:You are formulating an ink that needs to, you know, flow through a high task, high speed casting process. You're playing with binders, your pigment dispersing, how quickly it dries, you know. Are you getting pinholes? Obviously, that'd be bad in your, in your cathode material or anode materials, if you have voids in them, because those are essentially what print defects we can see in the industry would translate over into problems in the energy storage side. So, yeah, so it kind of gave you that sort of background comfort to be like, oh well, this maybe isn't too radically different to what I was doing, you know, making these electrode materials and casting electrodes.
Speaker 3:But yeah, and I was thinking in general, just having a different sort of background. I think is always great when you're being introduced into new industries, or even people you bring into industries, because they just have different perspective. And that perspective can sometimes, you know, allow you to approach a problem differently maybe than people who have been, you know, in the industry for 20 years. You kind of may be set in your ways. You don't know, or maybe you don't ask the questions differently that you maybe should be asking, because you've just been almost trained into such a model of thinking. So I like to think it provides me maybe just a slightly different perspective. It doesn't mean that that perspective is right or wrong, but you get conversations going and then maybe it leads you down a path that you weren't intended to go down.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So you've obviously been leading the sustainability initiatives within NASDAQ and I think it's called cares right the initiative yep yeah cares, kind of our overall umbrella for all of our, you know, sort of sustainability not necessarily sustainability, but just everything of philanthropy, health and well-being and obviously sustainability in regards to environmental and stuff like that. But obviously, depending on your definition of sustainability, those could all roll up underneath that. They may be different.
Speaker 2:You know, it's kind of tricky part of sustainability is that it means something different to everybody yeah, so I spent you I suppose you made um time at the beginning to really sort of define what it meant to nasdaq right yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, some of it was just investigating what it is that you know we do here at NASDAQ. You know, obviously I was firstly hired into NASDAQ, so you know I want to make a big impact and I know all these things. And you go around, you start having conversations with people, learning about, hey, what are we doing with our wastes and or what are we doing over here in regards to manufacturing, and you end up learning. Number one it helps you meet a lot of people within your organization because then you're potentially interacting with people you wouldn't interact with on a daily basis. You know, oh, I'm talking to my material handler. Well, in the world of R&D, why am I need to talk to the material handler that well? So in some of it it helps you get to know your company better just by sort of this investigation of where are we today?
Speaker 3:And that was surprising when I started that and got to after my investigation where after a couple of weeks it was we've got a lot that we're doing here. That's the right thing to do and that was one of NASDAQ's core things is always just try and do the right thing, whether it's serving your customer or helping your fellow employee, or just doing the right thing by the environment and stuff like that. That seemed to be the basis of a lot of what NASDAQ did was just doing the right thing, and usually you can always trace it down to usually there's some sort of economic benefit that has driven people into why they did what they did. That doesn't mean that it's wrong. I mean, uh, it just uh, just. Maybe what was your initiative or what gave you that initiative? Maybe you've been different, but at the end of the day it says your company money.
Speaker 2:That's sustainable and it also, if it allows you to divert your waste, it's a win, win for everybody yeah, yeah, and I guess, I guess, and I guess part of the value is, like you say, learning, going company-wide, looking at everything, asking why Did you find some surprising, learn some surprising things and make some gains, and so on? What was the most surprising challenge, or perhaps success so far in that entire process?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, I think some of the biggest challenges you have when you're starting off is just really is finding that information and getting it together and holding it. Bringing it together, so you know, quite a big job, right? Yeah, exactly, it's completely distributed within your organization. People know who's doing it, but then it wasn't necessarily, I would say, for NASCAR, it was wasn't formalized to where we would like it to be, you know, and it was like go talk to this person. Go talk to this person.
Speaker 3:Eventually you got the answer, but in reality, from from someone, someone new coming in, if you wanted to come and say who do I talk to, you could have gotten the answer of let's talk to five different people and maybe only one of them was the accurate person to be speaking with on that topic because he's oh, he's in regulatory. Go talk to him. Well, regulatory guy says well, not really, it's this guy over here. So I think it's some of the challenge was just trying to uncover that information and bringing it all together. And then, like I say, some of the most surprises is when you uncover that your organization, they say they're doing the right thing, and you uncover that yeah, we actually were doing the right thing Makes you feel good about when you switch jobs and you're peeking underneath the carpets and looking in the closets and like oh there isn't any hidden skeletons here.
Speaker 3:They're doing the right thing. So that was always, you know, very a good, very pleasant surprise not to say that anyone I've worked in the past isn't doing that, but it's just one of those things that when you're getting to know a company, you get to learn more about it and you get to really understand some of its history and how they got there. And it's always good to find pleasant surprises of wow, yeah, there's a good culture of people here. They want to do the right thing and, especially when you enable them, they'll continue to do the right thing and maybe even find new opportunities.
Speaker 2:RAOUL PAL. Yeah, yeah, and obviously Nadzor. You're based in S, but it's a global business as well, so your approach has been to go is this focusing more on the US, north America, or is it a company global?
Speaker 3:I mean. So I would say, is because they were historically doing the right thing. It is a global thing. I would say predominantly the focus mainly here is being US centric thing. I would say predominantly the focus mainly here has been US centric and we plan on rolling more of these programs out globally. But, like I say, a lot of our waste diversion programs that we're doing are global because that's doing the right thing and a lot of some of the other philanthropy things.
Speaker 3:There are challenges when you're dealing with different time or different currencies in different countries, but in general, yeah, I'd say the NASCAR CARES umbrella is a global initiative, not just for Shawnee, but you start where you're at and then you slowly begin to feather out elsewhere. And that's one of those challenges I find is when I start looking at some of our getting our information from some of our branches and stuff about trying to collect, hey, how much water do you use here? How much energy do you purchase? It is surprisingly difficult talking to utility providers and you say, hey, just give me my annual consumption of water last year and they'll give you the most convoluted document in the world.
Speaker 3:And I got a PhD and I can't even understand what this says, and all I really needed was a number how many gallons of water did I use last year? And you get a three page document with all you know, a ledger of all these transactions. It's like all I need is just one number, but you can't figure this number out very easily. So it's something that you and I potentially as consumers, it pretty easy, but once I started digging into these other you know municipalities, it's it's not as easy just to get that information that you would want to be able to kind of um, bring it together and make it into an easy digestible format to share within your organization and that and that's um.
Speaker 2:That's a big challenge getting the data at the beginning, because you need to start with data right. You need to right, you need to have a clarity on where you are in order to improve your performance, otherwise you'll never know right.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Yeah, yeah, having that data together. I mean, yeah, once you have the data together, then you can you know within NASCAR. As soon as I kind of got some of that preliminary data together, I put a presentation on sharing what it is. You know A how much water we were using, how much electricity we were using natural gas, you know how much gas we're buying for our fleet vehicles.
Speaker 3:So, bringing in all that sort of scope one, scope, two, emissions and other utility data, you bring it together and then you start analyzing it, looking at for seasonality, trends and stuff like that, and then you can start, you know, drawing conclusions of. You know why do we use a lot more water during the summertime than we do in the wintertime and stuff like that. Or you know what, why do we all sudden use less natural gas this year than we did the year before? And sometimes you can attribute to it well, it has gotten a little bit warmer here and our winters weren't as cold so we weren't necessarily having to heat our plant as much. So you know sometimes very much there are external factors that drive, you know, consumption of you, consumption within your organization. You have no control over um, but they. But when you begin to understand those trends then you can be start looking for action items to um focus on, because without that, sustainability is pretty daunting to start.
Speaker 2:You know um if you take it and that's, that's a an honest fact, isn't it that? Um, it's a giant issue, it's a enterprise-wide um way of thinking, it's strategic and it's it's often complex and it's I mean, I can understand it you being the right person for it with the cto and your technique, the way your technical mind works, because that would come into play a lot, I think. The sustainability, because you have the kind of mindset I would imagine to be able to drill down into the data and so on and really understand where you are and be able to map where you are. And that's on the technical side of things. But also, sustainability is a challenge with communication as well, right, um. So so internally, how did you? Um? You know, obviously the culture within NASDAQ seems very attuned to sustainability. Anyway, like you said, you found some pleasant surprises, which is fantastic. But how have you really helped embed that mindset across the company, you know, from lab teams to IT, to sales and marketing, to manufacturing? How have you gone about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you know NASDAQ is a very good thing. We have a cadence where we have a teams meeting throughout the whole organization For an hour or two once every few months. Now maybe the whole organization gets on a giant teams meeting and so we call it our you know our communication meeting, where you know people will deliver, you know financial results, but people also spotlight certain customers what we do. So everyone kind of gets brought together to understand you know what it is that we hear we do here at NASCAR, because we are a diverse business and it's easy to get in your own silo and never understand what's happening in somebody else's silo. So the company provides a great platform for us to share information. And so, after I'd done that sort of initial deep dive into looking things you know, digging into, you know our dumpsters and pulling utilities together, they provide me the platform to share all that information. So, like I say once again, now you have that information, now you can start drawing conclusions. So once you put that into an easy digestible format for everyone to look at, then you can inspire other people. And out of that first meeting we had a great initiative and it seemed super small. So, yeah, you know, I shared the seasonality data of our water usage and obviously you could draw the conclusion that why does our water usage go up dramatically in the summertime? Well, I mean, it wasn't we were manufacturing any more than we were in the wintertime. It was hey, what happens? You're growing, you're starting to grow grass, and you can see it every year in the month of May and June, your irrigation starts going up and then, once it hits the fall, the water usage drops dramatically. And that just inspired one of our people at IT. He just said hey, you know, we've been running the same irrigation system for 20 years and it was just. You know, it was a good system, we had green grass, but it was a dumb system in comparison to I don't know how it works in the uk, but here in america you definitely get much more smart controllers and stuff like that to say, hey, it rained today, there's no need to turn on your sprinkler today, but that would be a manual intervention by somebody which obviously we're all got. We're all busy, very busy, and have our day job. So reminding someone, hey, don't turn that sprinkler off or turn that sprinkler off for tomorrow because it's going to rain, doesn't happen and yeah, just do that simple thing in a very cheap investment. I think we're less than $500 to upgrade our controller and obviously it took us a year to collect the data to understand what kind of impact that would have.
Speaker 3:So sometimes your sustainability initiatives, you can't see the immediate impact, even though you know it's going to make an impact. But you have to wait a while to get the data. And it showed us that by just a small investment in that, we saved about 200,000 gallons of water in a year. I think it's like half of a Olympic-sized swimming pool or something like that. I mean pretty dramatic. And then, of course, that's in perpetuity. That goes forward. So every year we're saving that much um, at least I'd say the floor is that much water, whereas we're saving on the irrigation.
Speaker 3:So you know, just a simple thing of just bringing the data together, sharing it on a community platform. And someone just came up with an idea that you know, hey, and he went and said, hi, this is so easy, I can even install it myself. So it was, you know, simple, simple, just simple purchase. The it guy did it, but somehow the it guy is saving us a ton of water, and those are the things you get just by sharing it and having a platform is you just don't know who's going to get inspired by the data that you um um present and how it relates to them, and they, and then they come up with an idea that you know you can go investigate, see if it can work out into something better yeah, yeah, and that um contributes to the bigger picture and and so on, and and I guess it what you, what you?
Speaker 2:I'm sure you found that this motivated people to get involved and to help you, and not only then. That. It then motivates you even further, doesn't it? And you start seeing results across the business and initiatives and so on. You obviously are leading this for NASDAQ, the sustainability program, or every strategy, nasdaq care initiative, et cetera. Tell us a little bit about um ecovades. This is something that has perhaps provided you with a little bit of guidance or or something to aspire to or to align with. Could explain a bit about how that's um helped you in terms of, maybe in terms of sustainability performance, but also perhaps in commercial conversations as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I mean I had been familiar with EcoVedas and I think anyone who is, you know, on social media they'll see everyone has one of these EcoVedas scores. So to me EcoVedas is great that it provides, I'll say, almost like a common language among sustainability, because sustainability means so much different things to different people. It kind of levels that playing field a little bit. Hey, we're all talking the same language now because at the end of the day, you know, nasa has a distribution business and they have a ink business for formulating well, what's sustainable for a distribution business might not translate over into, uh, ink side. And likewise, if I promote all my ink sustainability stuff, the distribution people are getting left behind a little bit here. So, yeah, ecovedas. So we started investigating that.
Speaker 3:And the good thing about EcoVedas is, once again, we do know that sustainability is a big elephant in the room. It can be daunting task and they kind of do give you a little bit of a format of hey, here are some topics and they're all broken down into individual topics and it's just hey, what is your policy surrounding these topics and stuff like that. So for NASCAR, hey, you know we didn't really, you know we were, we did the right things in regards to our water usage. You know we ran closed loop chillers for all of our plants so we weren't just, you know, needlessly wasting water and stuff like that in our manufacturing environment. We hadn't formalized it into a you know, a complete policy to know who was responsible. You know where were our you know usages of water and stuff like that and how were we monitoring it. So, hey, it gave you a template to follow and it definitely gives you you know, it helps you guide you on your sustainability journey to say, hey, yeah, okay, we were doing the right thing, but now we need to formalize it. Now that we formalize it, we need to report on it and then, uh, reporting on it, we can start making, you know, improvements on after.
Speaker 3:After you make that sort of you get that all together. So, yeah, it's at first, ecovedas is quite challenging just because it is a lot of documents. I mean, I think we probably end up submitting probably close to like a hundred type documents in there into their online portal. But you know, once again, it's very rewarding though when you come out the end and you saw that nowDAQ, hey, you got a silver medal and, like I say, did we invent a whole lot of new things initially? No, we just kind of hey, this is what this is, who NASDAQ was, and we just had to really formalize and get it in there.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I think ECOVS helps you just go along that journey is, you don't always have to get that gold right out of the gates, but it tells you, hey, it helps you benchmark where you're at. And then it gives you an easy guidance point onto what are some of the next topics that you can tackle, and that can either be not just the green, which everyone thinks of mostly, you know, environmental, but it also engages you on labor and human rights practices, supply chain, procurement Make sure you have policies around that, so make sure you're doing business with the right people and then also and Justin did also has a section about ethics as well. Hey, you know, are you doing enough to make sure that you know fraud isn't happening within your organization and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:So it really once again getting involved in EcoVedas. It got once again. It got me more involved, more so than just the environmental side, which most people go down to on when you think of sustainability. But hey, now I'm talking to the finance team. You know what do we have in place for policies around ethics? So, yeah, I talk to finance not that often, but you know we know each other. But now I got to know more people within the finance team and where our policies are and, hey, you know we've got a good policy.
Speaker 3:Maybe we need to add this into there and layer it on on top of that, but yeah, so to me in general, it's been a great program for us. It yeah, so to me, in general, it's been a great program for us. It works really well, of course, when you're not under the gun of a customer asking you to participate in EcoVedas, because then you got like 12 weeks to customers to say, hey, yeah, we see this, we understand it and we can see that. Okay, you've got a silver medal, so you take sustainability seriously. Like I say, it just makes a common language, whereas, like I say, if we're having to talk about all of our ink formulation strategies, it does a disservice to our distribution side, who you know they're maybe doing the right thing. So to me it just helps you give it an overall encompassing platform to share your overall sustainability initiative and a common language for people to understand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also I imagine it helps sales. It helps you know that process of you know, show us your credentials. It pulls it all together and you've got a very sort of well-known and respected you know certification. In essence, that proves that you are doing what you're.
Speaker 3:You say that must help and they help you facilitate, you know, evaluating your customers as well, and or your suppliers. So, yeah, it gives that. So within the, within the platform, you can say, hey, hey, will you share your score with me? And if they don't have one, you can ask them to get a score and submit. So, once again, it helps you identify partners who want to align with you on your sustainability journey, where you find more about your partners Like wow, you guys were doing a lot of the right things as well so I'm glad we were partners.
Speaker 3:So yeah, it's one of those things. You just don't know where it's going to take you yeah.
Speaker 2:So once you've done all the groundwork and so on, you've gone through the the journey. It's a it's about continually looking and updating and and improving and so on. Um, and I guess over time some of the big wins that you're going to make at the very beginning you know become smaller, but then I guess that's also commercially really really useful. Just curious, actually, because some of the sustainability wins may like the smarter irrigation, for instance I think you mentioned pallet recycling before may seem to some maybe to be a little on the small side, perhaps in terms of impact, maybe on a financial level as well as a environmental one. Why are these micro interventions? Why do they matter, in your opinion? What? What's it mattered, you know? Why does it matter? Do you need to? Because you just have to do it all when you're doing the right thing? What? What's the value beyond money?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, no, that's a good one. I think you attribute it back to you. There's a joke out there is how do you eat an elephant One bite at a time? You know you can't eat the whole elephant at once, but you got to take one bite. But you got to take one bite. And that's to me that's sustainability is, if you try to eat that whole elephant at one time, you're going to have to do a lot of planning and thinking and you're not going to have action. You know it's just going to be like, yeah, this is going to be a massive undertaking, whereas you know, with these smaller initiatives, as you're investigating you, just you're asking questions and you say you're coming in with a different perspective, maybe not from because I came from a different industry initially, but just hey, the r&d guys haven't come and asked us really a question about what we do with our waste. You know some of our waste and that's kind of where it came down to.
Speaker 3:Like you mentioned the pallet recycling. It was just like, well, why are we doing? Why are we throwing all these away? And it was simply well, it's well, our vendor didn't want to take the odd size pallets and I'm like, well, we can't tell our customers not to ship us stuff on the odd size pallet. They're still great pallets. So it was just like how do we call somebody else? We can do that, why not? It doesn't matter who. So we called someone else and they say, oh yeah, we call someone else and they say, oh yeah, we'll take all of your odd sized pallets, we'll take your broken ones and if we can't fix them, we'll turn them into, you know, landscaping material and find a second use for it, and obviously these are wooden pallets.
Speaker 3:So to me, throwing organic material into a landfill is kind of one of the worst things you can do, because, number one, you're taking that perfectly good pallet out of circulation, but also it's organic. It's powered out of circulation, but also it's organic, and usually landfills love to chew on organic material and make methane, which is, you know, one of the more potent greenhouse gases. So yeah, to me it's just the small questions can turn into easily actionable things that don't require, you know, massive investment. It can be simply just a phone call and wow, we had the success here. Phone call and wow, we had the success here. And I think overall, in one year, just because of that phone call.
Speaker 3:We diverted additional 25 tons of pallets to a pallet recycler, whereas before those were just taking up space in our dumpster, requiring more trips to the landfill. And so, hey, once again you're reducing the number of you know pickups, so there's a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and just overall, yeah, nasdaq is saving a little bit of money, but it's. You know, it's not massive, but at the end of the day, it's doing the right thing. Yeah, and stuff like that. So, yeah, to me it's just those small bites are. You can get easy wins and you can build momentum off of that. Yeah, and it's easy to you know measure. Once you have those policies in place, you can see the impacts of your small choices when you have all the data, so they're really important.
Speaker 2:They're moving from small perhaps the larger ones. Yet tell us a bit about this solvent reclamation, upgrade, um and what that impact has had, because this is um, this is perhaps more of a significant thing that that that has really helped in terms of um sustainability within nasdaq yeah, so, uh, yeah, so I can't remember exactly how we got on the.
Speaker 3:On the topic of looking at the uh, you know the solvent weight, you know our solvent cleaning system and stuff like that. Um, but you know, we ended up looking at it and I thought you know what harm could it be?
Speaker 3:Let's just take a quick peek and look at this. And it uncovered that, you know, potentially someone wasn't really you know, we had someone had rolled out a new formulation, I think based on a recommendation from the vendor who updated, who upgraded our still, and I don't think the due diligence wasn't completed to understand, you know, what they recommended.
Speaker 3:So you know we looked at it and we heard some complaints hey, it's a little too fast drying and stuff like that. So, obviously, what does fast drying mean to me? It evaporates very easily and stuff like that. Well, that doesn't make it a very easy system to capture those, you know, fugitive vapors we can just call it or VOCs volatile organic compounds. So we thought, well, what can we do internally to improve this process? Maybe it's less energy to reclaim is where I kind of thought we might end up.
Speaker 3:But in reality it turned into no, if you make some slight tweaks to our solvent wash, we can capture a lot more of that by not making it as fast drying. And so now, if we can capture that, we are keeping it in the closed loop system rather than, you know, potentially going out in the environment as just a VOC. So, and then, of course, once again, if you're capturing more of the same material and reusing it, there's a financial benefit for your company. You know wasn't what drove us into what we wanted, what we wanted to tackle here, but it's one again. It's one of those things like oh, wow, there's actually a lot of money in this and you, it's just some of the one of those things that it's uh it seems so low value to most people.
Speaker 3:You talk about it. You know we're just looking at our solvent, you know blend for our stuff. It doesn't seem like it'd be very impactful. But sometimes it's just asking those questions. You can be like, yeah, just it doesn't tell you. Like to say a glamorous story of like who? Now all the packaging cradle inks is compostable, which is a very challenging situation of itself. But uh, yeah, sometimes the winds aren't very sexy, I guess in a way.
Speaker 3:Um, so you're looking at a solvent blend, but sometimes there could be large financial benefits for that and of course, it's sustainable to your business as well, because now you're capturing that savings year over year on doing the right thing. And of course now, as we're tracking our VOC emissions that we implemented this year, we're hoping to see a pretty dramatic drop in our voc emissions as we make this as well. So once again the environment wins. Nasdaq seems to be winning here as well and again it's the overall right thing to do.
Speaker 3:So, like I say you just, sometimes you got to get a little bit dirty and like I say sometimes you're you're digging in your dumpster to figure out what is this doing in here and taking that out of the dumpster and sometimes you're looking at something as dirty as cleaning fluids and hey, you never know where you're going to land. But at the end of the day, they end up usually always being pretty good wins. You just got to have that curiosity, I think, to go and just ask some questions. Why do we do this? And sometimes the reasons are legitimately good reasons, and sometimes it was just I don't know when it was really keeping an eye on that. Okay, now we'll put a focus on it and now we can make a tangible win.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely, and I guess that's where your role with innovation obviously curiosity is really an important part of that, isn't it? As a CTO, you've got to be sort of at that mindset where curiosity is really important and, I guess, the link between innovation and sustainability. So, with this commitment that NASDAQ has, I imagine it's also a key thing when you're innovating, is it sustainability?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, definitely for sure. For us, obviously, it's providing new formulations for the environment that either A enhance worker safety, so that either the people using our materials, or A we're putting out more compliant formulations to make it safer for consumers out there. So, yeah, a lot of our innovation now is yes, as I mentioned early on in the in the call is a lot of our uv materials have been reclassified as a cmr material, so either cancerous, mutagenic or reproductive toxins, some ours, as we believe them to be and they may be, and stuff like that. So that so now, hey, if we're limiting use of those materials and a lot of our new innovations, you know, hey, we're reducing the potential exposure of our employees and people using our inks to those materials. But also, you know, say, the consumers, because you know, today there is residual, like I say, we all interact with print. We don't really appreciate it until you're made aware of it. So, yeah, provide safer materials.
Speaker 3:And it is a challenge in and of itself because usually the newer, safer materials aren't as robust as some of those old, historical ones. You know, they weren't great and they, once again, they did so many things that maybe you weren't aware of all that they accomplished. So sometimes, when you're innovating and bringing in these safer materials, you inadvertently break something that you didn't intend to break but you didn't know was really a key component of your formulation. So, yeah, so sometimes you get easy, easy ways to make a modification to a formulation, to clean it up for, um, you know, general safety of our inks.
Speaker 3:Um, sometimes it's really hard and you break some things, but uh, yeah, it keeps the. It keeps it fun though, for sure, when you have lots of challenging, because if it was just simple, know, just rinse and repeat kind of stuff, you know life can get boring. So when you're bringing these new sustainability challenges within, yeah, it's frustrating and challenging and hard, but it's also rewarding when you finally come out the other end with either a new, upgrade and compliant formulation that customers are really happy with new, upgrade and compliant formulation that customers are really happy with or you know you've enabled your package to. You know, evaluate your inks and say, hey, yeah, these won't be detrimental to the recycling process. That's good to know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic, and I guess it's about learning, isn't it? And being open to that and, like you say, the curiosity and so on. But it's can be quite inspiring when you make all these gains and improvements and there's a commercial value to the business. But, like you say, it's a cultural commitment as well, doing the right thing, which is really again inspiring, isn't it? It's um for you leading it, but also for everybody at nesdar um. So you were mentioning earlier you were talking about scope one and two looking ahead, scope three's coming down the road, isn't it? So perhaps you could explain a bit about scope three, its importance and so on, and and what kind of collaboration or infrastructure will be needed to truly tackle, you know, sort of value chain sustainability?
Speaker 3:yes, so, uh, so yes, as we talk about, scope one and scope two are kind of related to the energy that you consume either directly or indirectly and, like I say, those are fairly easy, while difficult to sometimes communicate with your utility providers to get the information you need. In general, it's a fairly easy calculation to get sort of the greenhouse gas impact of the energy you consume. Scope three is kind of about everything else within your supply chain. A is procuring the materials. You know how far where they ship from. You know also your distribution of materials. Where are you shipping them to? You know business travel. How much travel do you do regarding? You know your salesman going around visiting their customers and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:And then, obviously, what are the sort of embedded carbon within the products that you purchase and stuff like that. And I think there's at least like 10 or 12 different subcategories within those scope three emissions. It makes it really challenging to get a handle on because it is you know well, what can I do to change? You know my distribution. Well, my distribution in essence is kind of fixed. I have fixed locations I can't really change. You know where I manufacture it, maybe here in Shawnee, kansas, and get it down to Atlanta. That's kind of a fixed cost in terms of environmental I mean, there is inevitably there. We all pay a tax somewhere to the environment on what we want to do. But trying to understand how much of those different categories is impacting you is really hard to get to that number and I think a lot of it is. It's almost like a personal accounting of your business and that's something that I think we all can do it very well with.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of budgeting apps out there that you can help understand all your transactions you do personally and you create a budget. Oh, I know how much I spend on groceries. I know how much I spend on groceries. I know how much I spend on gas. Well, I think the business world you don't. You have that information a little bit here and there, but it's not collated into one giant portal to understand hey, we, we buy the same material from somebody from China, or maybe we buy it from somewhere in America, maybe there's a sustainability benefit. But to kind of track all that information and get that understanding is a little bit hard and I think it's a big lift on your IT department. Either A you have to get a software to help you with that, or maybe you try to develop your own internal software.
Speaker 3:But the general rule I've heard out there is that your scope three emissions really are more, correlate to more about 80% of your impact to the environment, and your scope one and two are in that sort of 20, 20% category, give or take, depending on your industry. So it's like, once again you kind of see how much you're already doing in scope one and scope two. You're like, wow, that's right, that seems impactful. And then you realize, is that's just potentially small potatoes to you participating in the business world and formulating your products, how efficiently you can formulate them and then also get them out to your customers as well. So I think we're we're just kind of on that path of investigating is how can we get a handle on this? And to me it is that sort of you're getting to a point where it it's not a small bite anymore that you can do to get a handle on that scope three emissions. It's a big bite. And how do you, how do you accomplish that? And so, yeah, we're looking at different vendors to see what kind of software tools they can provide us to help us, you know, really get a handle on all of our data and understand what it is, what impacts that we can provide by making changes.
Speaker 3:You know some people say, well, ok, we can maybe shorten the distribution from China to America for some of our materials. But you realize, the world's gotten pretty darn efficient at shipping things. So in reality, you know, on a boat that holds you know a thousand tank, you know a thousand containers, it does do it pretty efficiently. May not be a great thing overall, but it is. We've done a lot of. I think business in general has done a lot of good ways to minimize those impacts. You know, and maybe because the cost is so cheap, you don't realize what the impacts are by changing where you source the material and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's huge, isn't it? The more you do it, and I guess, like you say, it sounded like scope one and two are quite challenging and demanding, you know, rightly so, I suppose. But, like you say, scope three once you get to that point, the links with all the customers and all of your suppliers and everything else, it's like wow, that's quite a task as well, and I guess it's part of the journey, isn't it? And moving towards sort of more high level performance and environmental, but not just environmental, also around people and hatred, people, and ethics and everything else. So it's a it's a positive thing. What would you give? Um, just a final one, really any advice to anyone who's at the beginning of their journey.
Speaker 3:Ah, you know, don't be afraid of all the big players in there seem to be, you know, so far ahead. You know everyone's journey is different. You know you can go, look at some of the big people in your industry. It's like, oh wow, they got tons and tons of information out there. How can I ever compete? But try not to compete against somebody else. You know. Compete against yourself. How can we improve year over year? You know, obviously you want to make that as an attainable goal to get to maybe where some of the larger people in the industry are at.
Speaker 3:But small wins are great and you can and people recognize those small wins and as long as you're showing a commitment to that and making these general sort of improvements along the way, you're just going to slowly turn that small thing into a giant snowball and then now it's rolling down the mountain and it turns into a boulder and you've got an avalanche.
Speaker 3:So you know, you start small and you sometimes take much longer than you like to see the results of your actions. But you got to start somewhere and, yeah, there's no reason, no problems of starting small, because that's where we all started one day. And now, yeah, and the more information you get going together, the easier it gets, you know, to collate that information and build off of that. So it's like, oh wow, it was so hard to get this information. Well, now I know where to get that information and build off of that. So it's like, oh wow, it was so hard to get this information. Well, now I know where to get that information next year. Now maybe I can get an action plan on that. Maybe it's small, but then once again, you eventually find, okay, where are the pain points and stuff like that. So there's no shame in starting small and just building from there fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, listen, thanks, evan, for joining us at some and and best best wishes for the rest of your sustainability journey. Great stuff so far. Congratulations on becoming the cto as well. And um, yeah, and obviously you've been involved and are involved in the um manifesto for more sustainable print project too, so that's been invaluable for that project. So, um, yeah, I I think the key thing is we're all on a journey, as you've just said, and we're at different stages and different times. We the best way of learning partly is by collaborating, isn't it?
Speaker 3:yep, you just never know where you might get inspiration from a collaboration.
Speaker 2:So absolutely well. Thanks for joining us again all right.
Speaker 3:Appreciate it, marcus. You have a good rest of your day thank you for listening.
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