Park Lane Press waters down its eco impact
The very nature of waterless printer Park Lane Press is environmentally friendly. In recent years it has continued to enhance its environmental credentials while ensuring that its clients’ work remains high quality.
For Wiltshire-based commercial waterless printer, Park Lane Press, adopting environmentally friendly practices has always been standard policy. Not having to play catchup now the environment is an issue on everyone’s mind has allowed Park Lane Press to keep its focus on providing quality. Phil Sudwell, Park Lane Press’ managing director, says: “We have around 30% of clients that use us for our environmental credentials, the rest of them come to us simply because we are good printers, without necessarily realising the additional environmental benefits we provide.”
Park Lane Press was a family run business formed 1991, as a friendly handson company with quality and environment at the heart of its values. When formed, it provided print to the trade. Over the years this has changed, and it now mainly produces design, marketing and advertising agency work as well as producing print for charities and blue chips. It says that in a single week it produces a range of printed items from direct mail pieces, brochures, corporate id items, folders and press packs. It also prints calendars, catalogues for art and furniture companies, greeting cards, corporate brochures and annual reports.
The decision to implement the environmentally friendly waterless printing process came as the solution to a practical problem. During its early years, the company found that the water in its location was of poor quality for printing, so eight years ago, when it moved to a new site with a new press, it began to look into the waterless printing process. Once Park Lane Press researched the process it decided to go ahead and make the move to waterless printing. The dampeners were removed from the presses and Park Lane Press taught itself the waterless printing method. “We persevered and mastered the technique,” says Sudwell.
Waterless printing is an offset lithographic printing process that eliminates the need for water and a dampening system used in conventional printing. It uses a special silicone coated printing plate instead of a standard aluminium plate and usually has a means of temperature control on the press. Vegetable based inks are used in waterless printing, with the ink repelled from the non-image areas by the silicon, replacing the need for water, Sudwell says. Instead of the press operator balancing the delicate relationship between ink and water, all that waterless printing requires is a temperature range of transferring ink onto the substrate.
The presses Park Lane Press use for waterless printing include the six-colour Komori Lithrone 628 EM waterless press, and the four-colour Komori 428 EM waterless press, both of which include an anilox coating system. They both handle a maximum sheet size of 520mm by 720mm, with a maximum image area of 510mm by 710mm. As neither of the presses requires water, Park Lane Press has found that the rubber rollers don’t become pitted and breakdown due to the fact that there is no water taken up into the ink chain, and therefore lasting a lot longer. In the eight years that Park Lane Press has used waterless printing, it has yet to change a single roller.
While waterless printing has provided benefits for Park Lane Press itself, it also allows printing to be produced with as little harm to the environment as possible. The most obvious environmental benefit of waterless printing is in the name: it does not require the use of water. Using waterless printing can result in a dramatic conservation of the world’s depleting water resources, the Waterless Printing Association (WPA) says. It gives the example of a Swiss waterless printer saving approximately 66,000 gallons of water in one year.
As waterless printing produces the correct colour faster than conventional printing, there is less paper and ink wasted, which in turn means that less fibre has to be used. This results in saved manufacturing and paper costs, as well as being beneficial to the environment. Conventional printing uses alcohol-based fount solutions, which waterless printing does away with. Waterless printing uses vegetable inks instead of solvent based ones, meaning that the amount of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the atmosphere are significantly reduced by as much as 85% to 95%, the WPA says.
Waterless printing is certainly beneficial to the environment, but that does not mean customers have to cope with a reduction in quality to accommodate this. Compared to conventional printing, the waterless process produces vastly improved colour enhancement. This is because without a dampening system, the process can print a far greater level of ink, providing colour consistency throughout the run, an increased depth of image and a closer match to Pantone colours.
It offers higher screen rulings, printing up to 300 lines per inch, which Park Lane Press says is almost double the resolution that the industry provides. This also allows for a larger range of colours to be produced in four colour printing, potentially an increase of 20%, according to the WPA. Overall, this creates brighter colours, subtler mid-tones and sharper images.
Waterless printing enables clients to produce work on paper stocks that standard litho printers cannot usually handle, as without the dampening system, many of the paper problems associated with offset printing are removed. Sudwell adds that the process is particularly good for uncoated papers. Faster make-readies are also possible using the waterless printing process.
There are many advantages to using waterless printing, both on an environmental level and from a client’s perspective. These benefits have led to its worldwide growth, especially in Japan, Scandinavia and the USA, but it has yet to make a significant impact in the UK. Sudwell says that while there is a wide mix of waterless presses, there are only a few commercial printers in the UK who offer this service.
Explaining why this is, Sudwell says: “Waterless printing is still niche in the UK because there is no company which sells the entire package, the product and the training. Established printers are therefore less likely to want to spend the time retraining their staff in new skills and processes. With the growing environmental awareness, some printers may consider waterless printing, but this will take time. Start-up printers are the ones most likely to take the plunge, but with over-capacity in the market, there are few new companies emerging.”
Many UK printers may not be taking advantage of the benefits of waterless printing, but Park Lane Press has found that the number of clients converting to waterless printing is growing. Sudwell credits this to clients wanting to be more environmentally friendly. He says that many clients ask for Park Lane Press’ waterless printing logo on their product to prove that they are using environmentally friendly processes.
The core of Park Lane Press may be built on an environmentally friendly waterless process, but it does not only use this to claim an awareness of environmental matters. It also influences the company’s purchasing decisions.
Park Lane Press has recently installed a Canon imagePRESS C7000VP digital press which prints at 70 pages per minute on 300gsm paper. It has a 10,000 sheet capacity and can print on sizes ranging from A5 to 13 inches by 19.2 inches. Sudwell explains: “We only wanted to move to digital once we felt it could match the quality of our other presses. We felt this press was the right one for the job, especially as the only waste it produces are the plastic toner cartridges, which can be recycled. Canon also has a very good environmental policy within its business which we feel corresponds with our own views.”
For five years Park Lane Press has held ISO 14001 accreditation, and in the past year it also been awarded both FSC Chain of Custody certification (SGS-COC-003257), and the EMAS standard UK-000152, which requires a company to publish an environmental report available for public scrutiny. Sudwell says only around four UK printers have this accreditation. Park Lane Press also uses a carbon neutral fleet, with all the company’s energy coming from natural renewable sources. Its house paper is Howard Smith’s Regency Satin FSCcertified stock, and it encourages clients to use FSC paper wherever possible.
Park Lane Press is continuing to improve its environmental practice. In the coming months it plans to become more involved with local community projects. Over the next five years Park Lane Press is also aiming to achieve a 10% reduction in its energy consumption, along with decreasing its landfill waste, diesel and hazardous products by 10%.
Park Lane Press is looking to the future to ensure it continues to be as environmentally friendly as possible, while still maintaining its high standards of quality. However this strategy is nothing new for the company, as Sudwell explains: “We have achieved so much to ensure that we are environmentally friendly in the last eight years, but we have never shouted about it. For us, the emphasis has always been on quality and the environment.”