Being more environmentally friendly doesn’t have to be a huge effort. Instead, making more conscious choices when purchasing items for your business can make a huge impact on the environment. When printing labels or other branding decals, using digital printing can be beneficial to the environment.
Going digital boasts many green benefits that will help alleviate the impact of printing on the environment.
Electronic Proofs
With more traditional printing, a press proof would have to be made to see how the project would actually print. This is because each type of paper has its own level of absorption. Digital printing, however, can be sent and approved digitally. PDF files give a near perfect idea of how projects will digitally print.
There are still some cases where a press proof will be necessary, such as when a special finish or unique material is being used. However, with a digital press, it is much easier to produce only one copy and avoid excessive waste than a flexographic process. This is because in the traditional method, the machines would have to be fully set up all the same as a full print project while a digital printing press is already ready for virtually any job.
Fewer Toxic Chemicals
In both offset and flexographic printing, there are a lot of toxic chemicals needed to achieve the right look for a print project. Between the dark room chemicals to produce plates and the solvents to remove ink from rollers, there is a long list of toxic materials used in every print job. Digital printing, of course, still uses some toxic chemicals, but it uses much less. In this type of printing, a mild solvent is used to remove ink instead of the older way of doing so.
Reduce or Prevent Waste
Of course, digital printing does require paper, but it does require less paper than traditional printing methods. With the constant running of a flexographic machine, they tend to use as much as 15% more paper than the newer digital printing machines. Without the same level of setup required for these new machines, scrap is often lower than 5%, eliminating 10% of waste.
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