Secret Seed Society

Welcome to print.coop, the ink-on-paper pages from specialist printing and design co-operative, Calverts. We produce high quality, economical and sustainable, commercial print. We're experts in the latest and best litho and digital printing technology, as well as traditional craft applications. We know almost every commodity grade or 'designer' FSC® or recycled paper on the market, and can tell you about the most cost effective formats.

our approach

Why work with Calverts?

Print buyers come to Calverts for four main reasons - our creativity, quality, expert advice and track record in sustainable printing.

We have proper conversations with our clients, to help them realise their print ambitions - from fairtrade teaching tools and low carbon travel guides to art and science comics and high end books. There's almost no print idea we can't turn into reality.

We have a hard-earned reputation as 'green' printers. We're always investing, learning and sharing what we know about every aspect of low environmental impact communications.

And Calverts worker co-operative business model means we're able to improve continuously, by putting our money into state-of-the art repro and printing hardware, software and training - instead of paying dividends to outside owners and shareholders.

All this adds up to higher quality, higher impact print; timely delivery - and a better print experience.

Get in touch and we'll help you print something beautiful.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Standards & certification

Design and print affect the environment. Calverts has therefore implemented an environmental management system to the requirements of ISO 14001 to reduce our negative environmental impacts.

We are committed to comply with or exceed the requirements of environmental legislation and other environmental initiatives to which we subscribe. We are also committed to the prevention of pollution and continual improvement.

Our objectives are to:

1) Reduce our carbon emissions

2) Reduce the impact of paper use on natural resources

3) Improve resource efficiency and recycling

We have set up programmes to achieve this with targets and time scales.

Find out more about our environmental initiatives.

Clients

Secret Seed Society is a new children's publisher. Calverts printed their first title.

Aimed at entertaining and educating early-years readers on growing and preparing vegetables, each title is printed at A6 and comes in a card wallet with a recipe, packet of seeds and stickers.

Written by Jean Webster and illustrated by Valentina Cavallini, 'No Hens in the Pen' follows the adventures of Chrissie Cress and her best friend Peter Parsnip (yes, all of the characters are vegetables), as they search for the family's errant chickens.

SSS came to us via the Kept website, because they are looking for the most efficient and sustainable print and papers for the series; we recommended Cyclus Offset 150gsm for the booklets - CMYK throughout, printing with Bio vegetable oil inks on 100% post-consumer recycled uncoated - and for the wallets, a rough manilla board from the Cairn range - also 100% post-consumer recycled, printing in black only. Both papers are supplied by Paperback, who pioneered recycled paper in the UK; they are a workers co-operative, like Calverts, and local.

In their own words, "Seed Society is all about making it fun to grow plants into local, fresh, organic and delicious food - even in urban places where we don’t all have gardens or allotments. What’s the point? Secret Seed Society want to revolutionise the way we interact with food. We’re concerned about the food miles, packaging, soil quality, costs, health issues, and lack of community driven by the current food economy. The recession feels like the perfect time to renew this. 'No Hens in the Pen' was launched at the Hay Festival, where the concept went down very well. So here's to more titles, reprints and lots of healthy, vegetable-munching kids. http://www.secretseedsociety.com http://www.paperback.coop http://www.kept.it http://www.jeanpwebster.com