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Protecting Nature - Ecological Offset Printing

Deinking of Paper - The opportunity to deink the paper - basically, to break ink and coatings from it - is crucial for sustainable recycling of it. Good deinkability is a prerequisite for using used paper to produce graphical papers and hygienic paper products. Effective ways can be found in these days for eliminating aqueous coatings and sheet-fed offset inks.

It is definitely more difficult to achieve good results with UV-cured inks and coatings, the liquid toner used in digital printing, and inkjet inks. Ink taken out of recycled pulp can be burned to generate energy to run the mill, or sold to make such useful substances as compost or gravel for roads. A single piece of paper may have new fibers along with fibers which have already been recycled once, twice, or several times. Paper-making fibers can typically be recycled 5-7 times before they become very short to be recycled again. Successful recycling needs clean recovered paper that's free of pollutants such as food, plastic, metal, and other trash. Contaminated paper can introduce impurities and bacteria into the recycling procedure. Furthermore, different grades of paper - corrugated boxes, newspapers, and office paper - must be kept separate, because the different grades of recovered paper are used to create specialized types of recycled paper products.

Eco Inks and Coatings - A few of the pigments used in ink contain metallic compounds which are harmful to human health and the environment such as cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury. Standard printing inks are petroleum-based and used with alcohol-based solvents. As alcohol and petroleum evaporate Volatile Organic Compounds are emitted.Volatile Organic Compounds represent ecological pollution and a health hazard to press-room employees. In terms of atmospheric pollution, Volatile Organic Compounds react with nitrogen oxides in the existence of daylight to create ozone pollution or photochemical smog. Offset inks generally consist to 30 % of mineral oils. Using Eco-inks, also known as Eco-solvent inks and green inks, can cut down at the consumption of fossil fuels. These products use transformed vegetable oils instead, such as linseed or soy esters.

Eco-inks are already widely used in some markets.The variation in reproduction quality and processing are hardly clear. All major European producers are involved in the voluntary commitment made by the EU ink industry to defending health and ensuring product safety. Soy and vegetable based inks also benefit the environment due to better ease of removal from wastepaper during de-inking for recycling.Also with UV inks a few producers have succeeded in changing up to 30% of the substances that go into their formulations with renewable raw materials. From an ecological viewpoint, in connection with packaging it is relevant that only extremely little amounts of offset printing inks constituents migrate from the printed surface into the substrate. Print coatings may also be regarded as inks who don't have pigments. Like Eco-inks, it is therefore also easy to use vegetable oil derivatives instead of mineral oils to create them. Dispersion and UV coatings are considerably less conducive to substituting renewable raw materials.

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