Page 16 - Print 21 magazine Jul-Aug 2021

Green Printing
Digital presses
towards sustainability
As customers demand green credentials from their printers, Jan Arreza looks at the moves digital press manufacturers are making to print in an environmentally sustainable way.
To meet the needs and expectations of today’s world, the print industry has reinvented itself in recent years to be more
environmentally friendly and resource responsible in a bid to pivot the industry’s operations towards more sustainable practices.
This has been brought about due to rising environmental awareness, changing market expectations, economic concerns, technological advancements and uncertain futures, which has contributed to somewhat of a crisis of confidence in print.
These years of uncertainty have forced print companies to better refine systems and operations and minimise wastage while ensuring maximum automation and efficiency.
The environmental change is being driven by the big print solutions developers, all keen to show their green credentials, and crucially by print’s biggest customer sectors – governments, corporates, retailers
– who all want to work with suppliers that are moving to environmental responsibility.
There is unlikely to be another industry sector that has moved so far environmentally, and so fast, as print. Within the working lifetimes of many printers, the process was
a dirty business, with presses
and prepress awash with various
16 Print21 JULY/AUGUST 2021
Printing: turning green
solvents and chemicals. Today, though, it is a completely different situation. Those nasty chemicals are gone. Paper comes from sustainable plantations, and there are more trees in existence now than there were 100 years ago. Printing plates are moving to process free.
Printers have plenty to tell their environmentally concerned clients. And just as eco-damaging print processes are fast disappearing,
the same is true of the presses themselves. The digital presses
that are now so common, especially among smaller printers, are in particular working hard to take their carbon footprint to zero.
Print business owners can tell their environmentally concerned clients that waste toner cartridges are recycled, that the presses themselves are largely recycled once they have reached the end of their working lives, and that the amount of energy needed to run the presses is coming right down.
Printers and their suppliers are also working hard to reduce their manufacturing carbon footprint, increasingly seeking energy from renewable sources including solar, for instance.
With that in mind, let’s take a
look now at what some of the biggest names in the industry are doing to be better in the sustainability space.
Canon
Guided by its global Environmental Vision, Action for Green, through the lifecycle design process, Canon’s designers aim to continually reduce a product’s environmental footprint through each stage of the lifecycle. The company reduced its 2020 lifecycle emissions per product by an average of 4.7 per cent, beating its target of three per cent.
Since 2008, this has contributed to a 40 per cent reduction in overall Lifecycle CO2 per product unit. Canon’s lifecycle design process continues to strive to reduce environmental impact
with initiatives, including making products more compact, lightweight, easier to transport, renewable and energy efficient.
“Additionally, as Canon is an
R&D technology company, we have invested heavily over the years in not only product technology, but also our recycling capacity,” explains Janet Leslie, manager of sustainability, Canon Australia.
“For example, we have developed an Automated Recycling System for ink cartridges, which separates materials to be reused for future cartridge components.”
Canon is contributing to the circular economy with five sites conducting recycling in four regions around the world.