Green Printing

By Brendan Dooley Saturday, 17 January 2009 13:57

  The Print Factory is probably Ireland's most environment friendly printer. We can make this claim because we use vegetable based inks; we use a chemical-free plate making process; we use paper that is either recycled or comes from sustainably managed forests and finally; we use rainwater. As a point of information readers should be aware that the vast majority of printing is done on printing presses via the lithographic process - using ink and water!
All waste paper goes to AES (Tullamoare) for recycling.

While printers in some parts of the country may have implemented one or two of the above systems - I know of none that has reduced its 'footprint' to this extent. Today, there is no chemical waste from The Print Factory!

Our path to lessen our environmental impact is ongoing, our first significant decision was back in 2003, when we decided to end the use of plastic packaging: we now supply printed material in cardboard boxes only.

Our heating system is one area where we can make further improvements. We had planned to replace our oil heating system with a wood burner, but following an energy audit, we discovered that we would lessen our environmental footprint even further by tapping into the cooling system of our three phase generator. We now have funding secured for this project and hope to have this work completed by the end of the year (2007). The water from the generator's cooling system will be piped into a large, very well insulated storage tank. This tank will be connected to our existing oil heating system: however, the oil burner is likely to remain off most of the time as the generator's coolant will be doing the heating - if that makes sense!

Readers of the Local Planet will probably be aware that we are working on a wind turbine project which we hope will reduce some of our ESB electricity requirements. However, this work is only at development/experiment stage and will take sometime to complete.

One very final point I would like to make is whatever printing company you employ, enquire about their platemaking system. If enough people ask the right questions, this may encourage other printers to take the environment positive route!

Brendan

 

My sincere thanks to Peter Schneider for carrying out the above mentioned energy audit.

 

 

No Alcohol!

By Brendan Dooley Wednesday, 14 January 2009 11:36