Printing Green!

You heard correct; to be earth-friendly, as we are often asked, will not cost any more money. Studies have shown that consumers favor a retail business who is recycling, conserving energy and practicing environmentally conscious business.

Here is an article written by Joel Makower at GreenBiz.com:

Look around your workplace, and you'll likely find plenty of printed material, from business cards to brochures to books. Printing words and images on paper may seem like one of the more environmentally benign things your company does, but that isn't necessarily the case. If you examine the life cycle of printed matter -- from turning trees into paper through the witch's brew of chemicals involved -- professional printing takes on a decidedly non-green hue.

The explosion of web and digital technology doesn't seem to have changed things -- as one pundit put it, the paperless office has turned out to be about as practical as the paperless bathroom. But if you still have to print, go green.

Green printing is on a roll, moving beyond small, do-good companies and activist groups to larger corporations and government agencies that have mandates to purchase greener goods and services. As demand for green printing has grown, so too has the number of printers offering such services -- or, at least, claiming to.

It's about time. The mechanics of most types of printing haven't changed much over the past half-century. Lithography and gravure -- the methods typically used to print books, magazines, and catalogs -- employ plates, which are used to apply ink to paper. Typically, the process involves a variety of inks, solvents, acids, resins, lacquers, dyes, driers, extenders, modifiers, varnishes, shellacs, and other solutions. Only a few of these ingredients end up directly on the printed page. The balance are used to produce films, printing plates, gravure cylinders, or proofs, or to clean printing plates or presses.

Many of the ingredients are toxic: silver, lead, chromium, cadmium, toluene, chloroform, methylene chloride, barium-based pigments, and acrylic copolymers. And that's not all. Chlorine bleaching of paper is linked to cancer-causing water pollutants. Waste inks and solvents are usually considered hazardous. Bindings, adhesives, foils, and plastic bags used in printing or packaging printed material can render paper unrecyclable.

And you thought it was just ink on paper.