What Do You Know About Green Printing?

Paper has always been part and parcel of modern culture and industry. For centuries, it has anchored businesses, schools, industries, private organizations, governments and individuals. Paper is used to preserve, spread, file, and hide information. Even with the coming of the Internet, the world continues to rely heavily on paper for our data needs.

The downside to all this, the need to supply billions of sheets of paper to the world each year has taken its toll on the environment. To create a mere ton of uncoated paper that is used to produce printing and writing paper, three tons of wood needs to be pulped. The process uses up nearly 20, 000 gallons of water and generates more than 2,000 pounds of solid waste.

Think of the millions of books published each year, the Christmas and Valentine’s Day cards exchanged across different time zones, the leaflets and fliers during election campaigns, the notebooks on which students record the day’s lessons, and you’d see millions of acres of rain forests razed and depleted. 

And then, it’s not just the forests. Tear down a tree and you get a bewilderment of nesting birds. Forests are an ecosystem. Damage it and you create a chain of effects including loss of biodiversity, flooding, and global warming. 

Production of white paper involves bleaching product with chlorine. This process creates harmful air pollutants; studies show that the paper industry is the largest contributor to air pollution. It comes third after the automobile and steel industries in fossil fuel consumption.

As we try to reduce or eliminate the dangers we have inadvertently imposed on mother nature by creating products that deplete our natural resources like water and energy resources, the urgency to save the environment is felt the more by private, government, non-government, and commercial organizations. The world is going green, and so is printing.

Although the Internet has helped lessen the need for paper to spread and store information, some organizations still require paper for marketing campaigns. Green printing provides an eco-friendly alternative to traditional printing by emphasizing on use of 100% recycled waste paper, chlorine-free paper, processed using renewable energy resources, or using non-tree materials (e.g. hemp).Organic Inks produce low volatile organic compounds as they are vegetable-based or made of soy. Printers are also powered by renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.

The qualities of the paper and the printing materials used in printing are two major concerns of a printing business. Green printing does not sacrifice product quality in the name of eco-friendliness. In the past, recycled papers had a brownish appearance. Today, you can place a recycled paper and a virgin paper side by side and you will hardly notice the difference. Green printing uses soy-based inks and carbon-neutral technology and this makes production costs very competitive in comparison to traditional printing and more often than not, recycled papers are less expensive than virgin paper.

At present, lack of information is what keeps the world slow in embracing green technology. Once the world gets past the myths surrounding green printing especially, about its quality and cost, we can then start winning the war against environmental pollution by making the world a lot more greener than it is today.