Understanding Eco Printing: The Sustainable Way to Print

Today, a successful business is not only defined as one that is profitable, growing, or making a change. To the definition of a successful business, being eco-friendly has now connected forever. And if you are into sustainable practices like depending on a green energy source, you are a great business, no doubt. However, this approach towards sustainability can also be applied to parts of your business that you may have never thought of. One such approach is to be greener when procuring your printing needs like hoarding graphics for marketing. Yes, the whole print industry has gone through an Eco-friendly wave and now you have options to be eco-friendly in your print choices. In this blog, you’ll learn how the print industry has become eco-friendly but first, where does it all start?

What is Eco Printing?

Before we look at what eco friendly printing is, let’s understand eco printing. Eco printing is an old technique of printing with natural materials. But What are these natural materials? These materials used to be the flowers or herbs that were put between the pages to get an impression of them on the paper. Now, you must have already figured out that it would have started as an accident. Probably yes, but its applications were discovered fast. For instance, in the perfume industry of the Middle Ages, these imprints were used to identify the ingredients of a particular perfume to recreate it.

Now across cultures, eco-print has a different name, but the techniques are also certainly different. A similar technique to eco-printing is bundle dyeing. In bundle dyeing, the plants or flowers are given a dip in a plain dye and then wrapped up in a cloth to get the impressions. So, that’s a short story of eco-printing. But why did you need to know this? The answer is that somehow these ancient techniques helped us humans to come up with sustainable printing techniques for commercial purposes.

For instance, modern materials like foamex hoarding are now widely used for creating sustainable and visually impactful hoardings. These hoardings offer an eco-friendly solution while maintaining high-quality designs for branding purposes.

Understanding Eco Friendly Printing

Eco friendly printing is all about making Printing outcomes sustainable. Yes, so it’s not only the ink which has to come from natural sources but, the printing technology and the print material as well. And the purpose of all this is to reduce the negative impact of printing on nature. So let’s look at all these three components of eco friendly printing one by one.

The Printing Technology

To start with, let’s take a peek into what innovation has been done in printing technology. While you may not be aware of exactly what printing technology does wrong and that we need innovation, there are two main problems. Firstly, the energy consumption during printing remains high because printing happens slowly. However, it’s a continuous process where we are becoming better and better every morning.

The second problem which is more environmentally critical is the use of Water to reject ink on the white spaces of print. Now that it does, it creates VOCs or volatile organic compounds which are not good for the environment. And no it’s not involved with the print but instead is a waste that goes to the environment almost instantly.

To tackle this problem, we have waterless printing, where to reject the ink on white spaces, a layer of silicone is used. Since silicone repels the ink without making it go to waste, it’s not only environmentally friendly but also cost-effective. And with this innovation, the print time has also improved. Not only this, but it has also allowed printing of a more extensive range of colours, making commercial printing even more beautiful.

For instance, the hoarding graphics for your branding can be more colourful than ever while also being eco-friendly. Yes, even hoarding graphics can be environmentally friendly, making you a sustainable business. To learn more about how hoarding graphics can support sustainability, check out our blog: Can Hoarding Graphics Be Environmentally Friendly?.

And when it comes to using such hoarding graphics, printing technology is not the only contributor but there are many others which you can explore to enhance your brand.

The Ink

Inks have always been a hurdle between going eco in printing. The reason is that most inks are made out of petroleum vases or sometimes worse, plastic bases. However, as we learnt above, eco-printing was possible back in time so why not on Friday?

The reason is that these natural inks aren’t good enough to be used commercially and hence become a DIY thing only. But now we have successfully cracked the code and have sustainable inks made out of soy or vegetables. Using soy-based inks is considered an equivalent of petroleum-based inks and some even tag it as even better because not only it’s natural but gives a brighter range of colours. However, the same is not true for vegetable-based inks as they aren’t so efficient and cost-effective yet.

The Print Material

See, when it comes to eco-printing on paper, we already have sustainable outcomes. To an extent, the paper itself is quite Eco-friendly. But what about the commercial printing of Foamex hoarding which can’t be printed on paper? Well, many options have started to emerge like PLA plastic made from plant fibre or polypropylene which can be recycled as it is a thermoplastic polymer which resists heat. So, if you get your hoarding graphics printed on such materials, you can even ensure safety from fire.

Reprinting the Future

To sum up, the innovations in the print industry have made humans a lot more caring about the world they live in. But innovations alone aren’t enough, we have to accept these innovations and give them a chance to thrive keeping aside factors like not being cost-effective if that’s the case. Because we know as things go global, they also become economical. So, if you also want to run an eco-friendly business, here we are to help you with our eco-printing technology only at Hoarding Printing Company.