Printing business environmental impact

All printing businesses can reduce water use. This can enable you to benefit from lower costs of both buying water and of disposing and treating wastewater and effluent.

You can benefit from filtering and reusing water used in washing machines and similar applications. Litho printers in particular can benefit from converting machines to waterless printing. This can save thousands of litres of water a year by eliminating the dampening system used in conventional litho printing.

What is waterless printing?

Waterless printing involves either installing a dedicated digital imaging system or converting a conventional litho press. Conversion involves removing the dampening system and resetting or replacing some of the ink train rollers and blankets. Depending on typical print runs, you may also need to install equipment to control temperature and humidity in the press room and to experiment with different inks and papers.

The benefits of waterless printing can be considerable, including:

• substantial savings in water use and effluent disposal
• improved print quality
• shorter make-ready
• significantly reduced solvent emissions
• less paper and substrate wastage

You can reduce water use by up to 60 per cent in washrooms through relatively simple measures, for example:

• fitting push-button taps on wash basins
• fitting automatic flushes on urinals
• installing 'hippo bags' in water cisterns
• regularly checking for and repairing leaks and dripping taps

For more information, see how to save water at commercial premises.