Environmentally friendly print is about more than recycled paper
Over the past four or five years we’ve all become much more environmentally aware about the impact our activities are having on the environment.
And I’m finding that many of my clients are keen to find an environmentally friendly printer. But it’s not just recycled paper you need to think about. Printing goes so much deeper than that!
One of the major benefits of using printing.com is that the way we’re set up massively reduces the impact of your printing on the environment. Because we print everything at our centralised production hub in Manchester you’re sharing the ‘waste’ with up to 120 other people. Let’s take a business card as an example.
Reduce your waste by over 100 times – just by making an informed choice about your printer
You order 500 business cards from a traditional chain of high street printers and copy shops. They take your business cards, make up a set of plates just for you, run through 50-100 sheets to set up the job, just for you run the press just for you and cut down and dispose of the waste just for you. Times that by 120 people and you’ve got a lot of energy and resources being wasted just for you.
Contrast that with printing.com. We take your business cards and transfer them to our centralised production hub where you share a huge (B1 if you’re interested) set of plates with 119 other people. We set up in 80 sheets, and the waste is shared with 119 other peopleWe run our state of the art presses for your cards at the same time as 119 other people’s. We massively minimise waste because we’ve put 119 other people‘s business cards on the same run. So before you even think about recycled paper, you’ve already reduced your impact on the environment enormously. And saved a lot of money to boot!
Here are some other things to think about if you’re keen to reduce the environmental impact of your print:
Recycled paper or paper sourced from sustainable forests. Paper is the one thing that most of our clients are concerned about – and we have many products that are printed on 100% recycled paper. Where possible, the rest of our paper stock is made from wood pulp which is Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF). All pulp comes from sustainable forests where trees are farmed as crops, just like wheat.
What happens to the waste? We recycle our waste into 17 distinct streams for easy recycling and reprocessing. All of our printing plates are recycled and the chemicals disposed of responsibly.
All ink is not equal. Some printers will use small cartridges of single colours (especially in spot colour printing when the presses need to be thoroughly cleaned between runs, wasting water and chemicals). We use vegetable-based inks, pumped straight from large drums, rather than smaller cartridges in wasteful packaging. And talking of packaging, we’ve drastically reduced the volume of waste we pass onto you too. All of our cartons are produced from unbleached board.
What is the company doing to reduce their environmental impact? Every order you place contributes to our great big goal of planting 25,000 trees with David Bellamy and Tree Appeal.
