Commercial printing is wide spread in the advertisement industry, where companies print posters, hoardings, vehicle wraps to publicize their products in the market. To reduce the negative effects of the bio hazardous ink and plastic required in the printing process, eco-conscious companies and printing presses have resorted to an alternative eco-friendly printing method. These eco-friendly printers use latex or soy-based inks in place of traditional chemical compounds, specialized methods for product finishing which will produce less chemical wastes and recycled materials for printing medium.
What is Carbon Footprint and How to Effectively Reduce It?
We have heard about greenhouse gases and how their increasing quantity in the atmosphere can effect the environment adversely. Carbon Footprint is a measure of the total emission of all the greenhouse gases upon the complete combustion of a particular amount of a compound. It is however, very difficult to precisely determine the exact value of carbon footprint of a compound but even approximate values give you a fair idea about the pollution capacity of that particular item.
Carbon footprint of a particular process will be the accumulation of all the emission details of all the chemical compounds used in the process. This value can be effectively reduced by substituting few or if possible all the pollutant chemical compounds by eco-friendly, green compounds. The various other ways to reduce the carbon footprint of a process, like in this case the printing process, can be summarized in techniques like recycling wastes, reduced use of hazardous chemicals, reuse of materials whenever possible to reduce the production of waste, proper and ethical disposal of hazardous waste and so on.
Why Companies Should Take Responsibility For their Environment?
Companies using traditional printing techniques, which do not attempt to reduce pollution and carbon footprint of the processes followed by them, emit a lot of hazardous wastes like VOCs, during a standard printing process. VOC is an abbreviation for Volatile Organic Compounds, which due to their high volatile nature evaporate and escape in the atmosphere, posing danger to the environment immediately. Along with their contribution to the greenhouse gases, the VOCs are carcinogenic in nature and continuous contact with them exposes workers to the risk of acquiring cancer at some point in time.
Alternative Printing Techniques
Alternative printing techniques or green printing is being widely accepted by various printing presses and companies in an attempt to ensure a greener future. Some of the techniques which can be modified are as follows:
Recycling paper and vinyl to reduce waste and energy consumption: Paper containing high amounts of recycled compounds is as good as virgin papers, which are made using tree fibers only. They reduce energy consumption rates considerably. Also paper mills which do not use chlorine to treat paper emit lot less toxic wastes into the environment.
Alternative eco-friendly inks: Conventional inks are all based on petroleum products, which are non-renewable and also do not get disposed well in the environment. Degradation of oil is difficult and they invariably contaminate the ground and water resources near a printing press. Soy-based inks on the other hand provide excellent quality to the printed end product and are a lot less toxic to the environment.
See how Hackworth is reducing our carbon footprint here: gohackworth.com/hackworth-is-green.