Digital Printing Sustainability: Environment Friendly

Eco-friendly options are always being asked about by consumers from almost every business. Often their questions are in regards to the sustainability of printing specifically. Brands are becoming more and more aware of their impact on carbon emissions and their impact on the environment.

Is “digital printing sustainable?”

There are many determining factors that shows, digital printing is an amazing eco-friendly option for printing. Digital Printing has improved over the years to prove its strong direction towards increasingly environmentally conscience efforts.

At Disc Pro Graphics we utilize several available efforts to push for sustainable printing for our customers. Let’s start at the beginning of the digital process of paper & substrates available, and move through the whole sustainable digital printing process.

1. Substrate selection

Digital substrates have increasingly been utilized by Disc Pro Graphics to show our efforts in recyclable material. Every year more and more paper selections are available to print the most amazing designs. And digital presses are able to run smoothly with these environment conscience requirements in mind such as Forest stewardship Council (FSC) approved Papers . Older Digital presses did not have this same capability which is now available.

2. Paper Paths

With our Kodak Press the shortest possible paper path decreases waste all around. The very design of the Nexpress utilizes the shortest print path which minimizes paper waste when errors occur during printing.

3. Paper Sizes

The ability to choose relevant substrate sizes for each job create less paper waste when printing any job. Longer and wider selections also help with minimizing waste. Utilizing unique sizes per the job helps create unique solutions to reduce paper consumption. Previous small jobs that had long designs that would traditionally be run offset might use larger quantities of paper just to get the color just right. Now with being able to print up to 40” long sheets this brings more small jobs to the digital realm, that wasn’t able to be as profitable to the environment previously.

4. Digital Printing Quality

Higher quality printing techniques such as ink dot size and registration has also led to reduced waste. Less ink consumption means less consumables for larger production amounts. And front-to-back registration quality means less waste for entire jobs going to bindery.

5. Consumables

Using environment friendly consumables goes a long way to pushing a sustainable printing future. Kodak has enabled this for Disc Pro Graphics’ digital department by providing inks and consumables that have impressive high rates of post consumer recycled material. Dry ink itself from the very beginning does not require extensive PPE when handling as other hazardous material does creating unnecessary waste. The Dry Ink container bottles are also up to 50% post consumer recycled content, also able to be recycled because they are type 2 HDPE Plastic.

Other consumables include replaceable digital press parts, the continual upgrades to the NexPress insure that ORC’s have the longest life possible, and when components reach their end of life, components are recyclable.

Printed sheets with DryInks used by the Kodak NexPress have been certified by INGEDE, they are de-inkable.

6. Press operations

Cleaner operations are a high priority for our Kodak NexPress. Virtually No emissions for any operations.  And with our NexPresses’ impressive uptime, reduced traveling for service calls and associated fuel consumption and carbon emissions.

Digital Printing does not require Offset printing plates which are even more materials saved.