Fuji: true processless plates tick all the green boxes

The environmental benefits of true processless plate technology are having a significant impact, as the rapidly growing list of users of Fuji’s Brillia HD PRO-T plate all improve their environmental footprints.

Fuji’s demonstrations of its new processless thermal plate at Ipex last year certainly drew the crowds. But its success in transforming print operations up and down the country since that date has been nothing short of phenomenal. In the twelve months since launch, PRO-T has been installed in close to 100 printers across the UK and Ireland, with each company benefiting from a reduction in their environmental footprint.

According to Fuji UK marketing manager Graham Leeson, “the uptake of PRO-T has completely exceeded our expectations, proving that there is considerable pent-up demand for a genuinely true processless plate”.

Speaking to adopters of PRO-T, the driving factors behind this rapid uptake of the new thermal plate appear to be as much eagerness to improve environmental performance as the prospect of saving money on chemistry or removing the need for a processor and the time-consuming maintenance that it requires. “Environmental issues are very important to us and by choosing Fuji’s fully processless plates we have already seen a huge reduction in our chemical waste,” confirms Joy Rice, managing director of Target Print in Leeds.

But the environmental benefits of a true processless plate are not limited to the volume of chemical waste. There are savings to be made in terms of the energy a typical processor might use, along with the considerable water volumes involved in processing a normal CTP plate. In addition, the waste chemistry does not have to be disposed of, and there are benefits from not having to use the energy and resources required to manufacture the processor and chemistry in the first place. Indeed, Fuji has calculated the equivalent carbon footprint of PRO-T to be over ten times lower than that of a normal processed plate (around 20g of CO2 per m2 of PRO-T plate compared to well over 250g for a normal processed plate).

There are also advantages in using a true processless plate rather than chemistry-free as Ian Willcox, Print Centre and Bindery Manager at the University of Southampton Print Centre, testifies: “We found Fuji Brillia HD PRO-T plates to be the best solution out of all the plates we tested as they use no chemicals at all, eliminating waste material completely.”

Fujifilm is bullish in pointing out that there is currently only one plate on the market for which the environmental benefits are this significant and can be made without any sacrifice to quality or productivity. The experience of users such as John Foley, repro director at West Midlands-based Hill Shorter, who’s been using PRO-T for a year now, shows that there really isn’t a downside to switching: “We are getting just as good print quality from processless as from the processed plates,” he confirms. What more incentive could a printer possibly need to join the growing list of users making a positive impact on the environment and improving the carbon footprint of UK Print Plc?