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HP has announced a $200 million investment into furthering its water based printing technologies for corrugated packaging and textile printing. The money will be spent on digital printing technologies for these applications in order to make them more sustainable.
A new cooperative for green printing has been set up for sheet fed offset printing companies. The Print the Change cooperative wants to attract organisations keen to turn themselves into more environmentally friendly outfits.
We all know the advantages of going direct to press for the environment. Direct digital printing requires no intermediate steps to create a printing forme. The print can be produced on demand and benefits from data driven production so variable data is possible and colour quality can be assured. On demand print also means reduced inventories, say five instead of five thousand, and can be produced close to its point of use. All this adds up to reduced emissions associated with consumables, processes, storage and transport.
These days interest in sustainability and reducing environmental impact appears to be high. At least it is amongst consumers and governments, but although lots of people talk the talk, the number of companies in the graphics industry actually doing anything real is pretty dismal. Even amongst big name manufacturers, there are few bespoke projects designed to help printers and publishers build more sustainable businesses.
Sitting here in the midst of the Brexit chaos, it is very easy to also get depressed about the slow pace of environmental impact mitigation in the graphics industry. Fortunately the deepening gloom of the Brexit shambles matters little beyond the UK, such is the smallness of our contributions in the broader context. And the even better news is that the rest of the world in general and Europe in particular can and will carry on with the new normal. And this includes a higher profile and further guidance for environmental impact management.
