Green Horizons Wednesday, February 13, 2008 Jeff Baker, ceo of Manchester, NH-based design firm Image 4 understands that sustainability and eco-friendly design are the way of the future (his firm was recently named the world’s greenest trade show exhibit producer by Inc. magazine). The 18-person design firm has been around for 20 years, originally focusing on graphics and portable, modular, and pop-up displays. In 2002 that focus switched to graphic applications for fixed branded environments in niche retail and banks, taking their extensive knowledge of modular displays and applying it to that realm. Working closely with architects while reorienting those systems for branded environments led the Image 4 create team to focus more on green materials and building practices, culminating with an award-winning install at the Nexus Green Building Resource Center in Boston, which included designing, building, and installing environmentally-sensitive, low-impact way-finding signage, and more than 40 exhibits for Nexus’ sponsor brands. Event Design sat down with Baker to talk about making the switch to green, what designers and clients need to know about a sustainable future, and where the movement is heading. Take it away, Jeff: Event Design: What got you started focusing on green materials and building practices? Jeff Baker: We were challenged by Building Green magazine to produce a reduced environmental load trade show exhibit in 2002-2003. The culmination of accomplishing that was learning a great deal about sustainability in an architectural context. We began to apply that to exhibits, graphics, and signage manufacturing for branded environments. It started us on a quest in our internal processes to become more efficient. This aligned with a couple of hires on our side who had experience in quality control and what is known as lean manufacturing, maximizing efficiency, reducing scrap, and reducing waste. If you don’t use it in the first place you don’t dump it. That extended into fabrication on tradeshow and branded environment materials. We focused on that, and then we focused on materials sourcing and sourcing recycled component materials. We spent a great deal of time developing a printing method that would print onto material made of recycled soda bottles as a woven fabric—we were early adopters on that. We ended up getting contract-grade fabric and had a whole adventure around discovering how to dye sublimate on it. It was challenging. We scrapped 6,000 linear feet of fabric before we figured it out. ED: Tell us a little about the Nexus project and the challenges you faced. JB: Building Green got Nexus in touch with us when Nexus was building their Green Building Center and Library in Boston. Their charge to us was to create a 100 percent green, absolutely no vinyl, brand interior program. Also they wanted a display component in their library where their sponsors would have the opportunity to display rich content about the products they are selling in the green building industry. Nexus was the perfect storm. We brought our experience on the tradeshow and branded interior sides together with our green material printing and green signage fabricating capabilities. Everything is aligned there. ED: Across the industry, the one major complaint about green materials is higher costs. Where do you see costs heading in the future? JB: The recently released EDPA Green Survey identified a clear end-user threshold to the acceptance of cost around green materials. If it were a zero price load, 79 percent of end user exhibitors would buy a green product. If it’s a five percent increase, that number drops to 54 percent. I was sad to hear that a five percent budget differentiation would bounce you from a green materials option. It tells you how tight these budgets are. But the conversation should not be limited to the acquisition of the property—it needs to be around life cycle cost. If you look at how green materials and green thinking changes life cycle costs, it will reduce costs over a period of years. That begins with maybe an initially higher cost of acquisition, but down the road you have reduced shipping expenses, reduced drayage expenses, reduced packaging expenses. The industry has had a hard time communicating this to the end user, and our end users tend to be cost-focused. The life cycle conversation is where we need to go. The architectural and building industry has been there for a decade. While the acquisition cost of a recycled material may be higher, its performance over years reduces its expense. I don’t think the tradeshow industry is there yet, both from the end users side and the builders side. Europe has a very dramatic head start on us in greening their trade shows. Heightened awareness is key. We have to educate our account managers, sales, staff, creative directors, and production staff, and ultimately go out and educate the end user. It’s going to be a very big change from the way things are done now. ED: Where do you the green movement five years from now? JB: I sense that there is an accelerating interest and awareness in the general public. I’m a board member of the New Hampshire Businesses for Social Responsibility, and our b-to-b meeting attendance has been increasing dramatically over the past few years. The whole space around social responsibility, environmental responsibility, and sustainability is getting into mainstream conversation. As we make conscious decisions on how we build things, we’re pushing it back on our vendors. As larger organizations in this industry start making the same decisions we’ve made, that can’t help but accelerate the trend ED: Tell us about your new green building. JB: We’re moving into a new production facility, and we are building it to LEED standard. We made a conscious decision to spend about 20 percent more to build it to LEED and enjoy the operating efficiencies. This new facility will take our electric bill down by 70 percent, and our heating bill down 40 percent. We are making conscious decisions about that. ED: What do you like to when you aren’t thinking green? JB: I’m a fairly accomplished Irish traditional musician, and I’ve toured for almost 20 years playing Irish flute all over North America and Western Europe.
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