Sustainable Practices in the Printing Industry
Sustainable printing is the use of environmentally-responsible practices and materials to reduce the printing industry’s impact on the natural world. The entire printing process involves sustainability practices, from graphic design to production and disposal of leftover materials. It includes minimizing our ecological footprint, conserving our resources, reducing our waste, and employing eco-friendly technologies.
We use soy-based, water-soluble commercial printing inks.
Our pressmen no longer use the old-fashioned oil-based inks and toxic solvents to thin them. They don’t use poisonous chemicals in cleaning, either. They only need water for thinning and cleanup. Consequently, our cleanup results in waste water that is safe for city disposal. Surprisingly, water-soluble inks also allow us to reduce the amount of water we use.
We have multiple types of recycled papers to ensure the viability of our forests.
Post-consumer recycled paper is made from paper that was printed on once before. Paper manufacturers make beautiful and eco-friendly papers from recycled newspapers, magazines and office paper.
Pre-consumer recycled paper is another type of recycled paper that we offer. We recycle craps of paper with no ink that we trim away, collect, and send out for processing. Many wonderful pre-consumer recycled papers are available.
Specialty papers can be made from bamboo, cotton, industrial waste and agricultural waste. Recycled paper is a big part of our environmentally sustainable offerings.
Sustainable technologies include our graphic design and printing plates.
The process of creating artwork and transferring text and images to printing plates is completely digital. Our graphic designers create the artwork on a computer and export it in PDF format with the correct ICC color profiles for the individual press to be used. Next, they transfer the PDF to our in-house server.
Then our production team opens the PDF on our raster-image-processing (RIP) station, which separates the artwork according to the various colors of ink to be used. The team sends the resulting digital separations electronically to our digital platemaker, which prints the digital separations onto plastic printing plates, one for each color of ink.
Digitally-made printing plates do not require any further processing. Completely eliminated are the old-fashioned metal printing plates and the acid bath in which we used to etch them. By eliminating the dangerous chemicals formerly used in commercial printing, our digital design and platemaking process greatly reduces our impact on the environment.
Sustainable practices in Printing On Demand
We recycle all of the consumables in our digital press, including toner cartridges, toner bottles, imaging units, developer and drums. Its toner uses plant-based material to reduce environmental impact. Even the construction of our digital press utilized recycled PC/ABS resins and bioplastics! It reduces paper waste through accurate color and front-to back registration. Our digital press has a a low power consumption rate and is EPEAT-Gold Certified and U.S. Energy Star compliant.