In the printing industry, certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is very important to those that care about the environment. That’s why we prioritize buying paper that is FSC certified. Most of the stocks we buy are also a certain percentage recycled.

We strive to put local first and work with reputable Michigan vendors whenever possible. The less goods have to be moved, the less CO2 gets pumped into the environment.

By buying local it also keeps our tax dollars here in our community. More than 95 percent of our vendors are based in the state of Michigan.

We accept back our boxes from customers to reuse in the future for other customer! The more we can reuse a singular box, the less energy has the be spent recycling and creating another. Simply give your boxes back when picking up your next order, or give it to the delivery driver when they drop off your order. If any materials we receive are a little too damaged, we take care to recycle them properly.

In this germ conscious covid era, shrink wrapping is a request we often accommodate to ease customer’s concerns about packed materials. They are shrink wrapped upon request to allow for the lowest amount of touch on their final product, but that means more plastic waste. At Swift we use leftover plastic from shrink wrapping for filler in our shipping instead of throwing it away as a way to reuse and give new life to the waste.

Recycling is the obvious one when anyone talks about being sustainable, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’re doing this critical piece of being green! We have separate bins in our shop to segment paper recycling, cardboard recycling, envelope recycling, and other recyclables. This segmenting allows the different pieces to go to specialized plants and increase the chances of the materials being recycled and having a longer life. Unfortunately, only about 32.1% of items get recycled according to research done in 2018 by the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s even less for plastic, an astonishing 9% gets recycled. By sending materials to the correct plants and not to the general recycling, as well as presorting it, we increase the chances that the materials will actually be recycled.

We wouldn’t be anything without our community around us. And that’s why we’re always giving back. We’ve done a lot over the past 72 odd years. Including in 2020 our coat drive, in 2021 we were sponsors of Sullivan field. We also put up the Red Lion Sign on Bridge Street. We sponsor and host the running group WestSide Stride, which often donates extra funds into different non-profits as well. We work with Genisis Non-Profit to bring low cost housing in the apartments above us. In fact, community is our highest score in our B-corp certification. We know that if we want the world around us to get better, we have to help it ourselves.