In this age of digital technology, printing presses still play a major role in the production of a range of materials such as booklets, posters, postcards, brochures, business cards, calendars, stationeries etc. While this wide-spread process of printing gives us such informative and eye pleasing products, the resultant environment pollution caused due to these goes unnoticed. Saving the environment is a responsibility that is vested on for all of us and thus the need of the hour is to print green.
Printing green refers to the process that reduces wastes, encourages recycling and implements other measures that leads to an eco friendly printing operation. Such printing presses carry on their processes in a way that causes minimal harm to the environment. The primary concern for a green printing press is to manage wastes effectively. The objective is to have less waste being generated as that would mean fewer measures to be adopted to eliminate such wastes. Waste management starts from the prepress process itself. Efforts are concentrated towards pollution prevention processes that start with photographic chemistry management and recycling of used plates etc. Furthermore the wastes are segregated into categories such as hazardous and non hazardous wastes. The discharge of hazardous wastes is carried out in an eco friendly manner. Waste management in green printing houses are two fold i.e. either they implement measures to reduce wastes or else recycle them.
High volatile organic compounds are one of the prime causes of air pollution in the printing industry. These compounds evaporate very quickly at the room temperature which not only adds to more material consumption but also leads to air pollution. Green printers use low VOC's in their printing processes thus reducing the air emissions and also less material consumption.
Green printers adopt various means to implement the current printing technologies that are eco-friendly. Thus they not only help in reducing environmental pollution but improve the overall quality of the product.