If you want to be thorough, and avoid sacrifices in cost or quality, green design takes time. Time to research and test processes and materials, time for setting up press sheets, etc. When we first started practicing green design, we didn’t receive compensation for any of our green efforts (e.g. specifying eco friendly paper or print process), but clients always saw it as a bonus—an added value. Now that we have a significant amount of experience and case studies, clients do engage us, at least in part, due to our expertise on the matter (and hopefully this will increase as we diversify and increase the scope of our eco case studies).

We intentionally bill ourselves as “an environmentally responsible design studio” and as a result, green design is automatically included in work. We build in time to oversee the production of each print project we take on, and every print project we oversee is sustainable to some degree—it’s intrinsic in our approach to print projects. Occasionally we’ll need to dive deep into research on a new production process and often the time to do so is at least partially unpaid. With large volume print projects, our efforts to minimize waste provide an immediate ROI for green design, so it saves the client money (which is the driving force behind many large corporations “going green”). In those circumstances, the value is clear, but if the client sees green design as an added expense with no added value, you’ll find more difficulty in finding interested parties. So the answer is yes, clients will pay for green design but it will probably take some unpaid investment time in the beginning to be able to price it as a valuable service.