Reducing environmental footprints and adopting sustainable manufacturing practices is simply the way to do business today. Your customers are more likely to spend their money with organizations that are committed to sustainability and align with their values.
Print tends to get unfairly tainted as an environmental villain, though much of the criticism is easily debunked. Printing has come a long way in adopting sustainable practices. This is especially true with digital, particularly inkjet printing.
One of the huge advantages of inkjet technology is its ability to efficiently and cost-effectively produce on-demand printing, from very short to larger runs. Clients can print the quantities they want whenever they want. This is true even for fully variable documents with several fields of information. The capability has profound effects throughout the production process, making it more streamlined, less wasteful, and ultimately much more sustainable.
Environment-Friendly Inkjet Benefits
Less Waste You can set up inkjet printers and bring them to full color much more quickly than other printing technologies, which means using substantially less paper in the set-up process. Run lengths are closely aligned with need, reducing overruns, excess inventory, and storage needs. With inkjet, printers destroy fewer unused documents and avoid excessive recycling. Faster set-up also means using less ink, water, and other chemicals.
Cleaner Production Inkjet printing eliminates many of the steps that traditional printing platforms require, such as printing plates and the associated chemicals and solvents that are necessary for the process. There are no platesetters to run and maintain. Nor are there any harmful substances released into the air and must be diverted from the shop floor.
Less Water Unlike many traditional printing processes that require water for plate development, on-press printing, and cleaning, inkjet is a waterless process. There’s no water treatment and disposal. Water, as we know, is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity we must preserve.
Versatile Inkjet printers can print on a variety of materials, including paper, fabric, and even metal. An old industry joke is that you can print on a cat if you can hold it still. Not that anyone would, or should, want to print on a cat! The point is that inkjet is an impressively versatile printing technology. If the need arises to image alternate substrates, inkjet can handle the job. You won’t have to invest in other equipment. These devices can also print on easily recyclable products and handle many new biodegradable substrates coming to market, like lightweight packaging materials.
Less Energy Consumption Inkjet production generally uses less energy than other printing platforms. Prepress is quicker, you can do proofing via PDFs, changes don’t require manufacturing more plates, and you can print documents, even fully variable ones, in one pass instead of moving documents from one press to another. Eliminating those extra steps means less equipment that consumes energy and less space in the shop to heat or cool. From an engineering perspective, inkjet is a simpler process, with fewer moving parts than traditional presses, all leading to less energy consumption.
Eco-friendly Inks Inkjet uses environmentally friendly water-based inks. They produce fewer volatile organic compounds (VOCs) compared to the solvent-based inks commonly used in traditional printing that can pollute the air and need ventilation systems to reduce harmful health effects.
Inkjet is a process that reduces unnecessary printing and storage, limits waste management, eliminates several steps and some equipment from the production process, uses fewer chemicals, and reduces energy consumption. Inkjet printing is a huge step forward in sustainable printing and environmental responsibility. That inkjet matches the sharp images of other, more complex printing platforms is simply the icing on the cake.
DDS and Inkjet
Document Data Solutions routinely develops unique inkjet solutions to meet the needs of our customers. Regardless of your applications and workflow, we can create a custom solution for your unique requirements. If you have a pain point in your print workflow, and you seek a more environmentally friendly approach to traditional printing, call us to see how we can help.