Proactively Building a Future With a Focus on Sustainability

While naturally sustainable approaches have governed The Shepherd Color Company’s processes for decades, federal regulations, EPA policies and social pressures have heavily contributed to the sustainability practices that are being implemented today.

On a regular basis, Shepherd has been able to offer customers alternatives to certain elements that can result in a lower environmental impact. However, those alternatives are not always quickly embraced by customers because they can come with a higher cost, said Geoffrey Peake, manager of Research & Development.

“About 30 years ago, it was clear that regulatory pressure would encourage innovation,” said Peake, who joined The Shepherd Color Company around that time. “One of the things I recall working on was a project with a series of pigments that contained the element antimony.”

As a result of new regulations, manufacturers had to eliminate antimony as an element. “Chemically, that’s a fairly easy thing to do because the antimony is not producing the color,” said Peake, who is the manager of Research & Development. “You can find another element that’s not on the regulatory list to behave like that. In that particular case, the other element is much more expensive.”

With increased regulation, coupled with increased awareness about sustainability, Shepherd continuously changed the way it operated.

Other changes that came about as a result of federal regulations included the use of certain chromium elements in products. Certain levels of the element required hazardous labeling, for example.

“Of course, the customers don’t like the labels with the skull and crossbones so that causes industry to come up with ways to eliminate those impurities or reduce the amounts where you wouldn’t have to label them,” he recalled. “That was happening in the early ’90s. It has become more stringent and applied to a more extensive level of impurities over the years.”

Today, the focus is on the use of what is described as conflict minerals, which has increasingly gaining international attention, including in the United States. As a result, more U.S. companies are stepping up their efforts to manage their supply chains – ensuring that they’re not sourcing from war-torn areas of Africa.

In response to federal regulations, publicly-traded companies have been reporting on sourcing of products that could potentially be tied to human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and neighboring countries.
While not publicly traded, Shepherd is among the companies that is implementing stringent processes to ensure that its supply chain is not engaging in sourcing from DRC.

Determining sources for minerals hasn’t always been clear cut. As recent as 2014, before official filings were required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 67% of companies were unable to identify the country of origin for specific conflict minerals like tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold. By 2017, that number had dropped to 37% as more companies

As part of Shepherds sourcing initiatives, processes and day-to-day operations, the company will continue to take proactive measures to ensure sustainable practices.

“We’re continually coming up with products through more energy-efficient processes, and by using more environmentally-friendly elements and compositions that are less hazardous,” Peake said.