5 Environmentally Friendly Printing Practices Your Next Project Should Follow

The print industry isn’t widely well known for its environmental friendliness. In fact, it’s got quite the opposite reputation. Being more environmentally friendly not only has benefits for the environment but it can also benefit your business in many ways.

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As an industry, businesses should all be pulling in the right direction to reach an end goal of improving the industry reputation of being harmful to the environment.

For you to do your bit, take a look at these five environmentally friendly printing practices that your next projects should follow.

We’ll cover:

Enforce a Strict Recycling Scheme

As a business, you should be recycling all the time, whether it’s recycling materials and old printed products such as banners or inks, toners and cartridges as they can be especially harmful to the environment. Employee behaviour is perhaps the single most important factor in successful environmental sustainability practices. In order for your business to act more ethically, you need to enforce strict recycling rulings and regulations.

This will automatically lead to your next project being more environmentally friendly and ultimately, your whole business will become more eco-friendly too. By informing staff of the harms that not disposing of your waste properly can have, you’ll no doubt drive the message home that recycling is a must. And for new starters, they may not know any different so it will help with onboarding down the line in the future.

 

Use Recyclable Materials

There are various harmful materials that are used in the printing industry and it’s not efficient nor beneficial to continue using them. This doesn’t just limit it to the printed products either. Stands and frames can also be made of non-efficient materials. It’s possible to find stands and frames that are made out of already-recycled materials. And make sure you re-use them to make your printing regime ultra eco-friendly.

Plus, the ink that printing suppliers use is one of the main contributors to environmental harm from the printing industry. So, when you’re choosing which ink to go for, check how harmful it can be and importantly, how to dispose of it properly too.

 

Limit Your Deliveries to Cut Emissions

Wagons, lorries and vans are all main contributors to the production and release of pollutive toxins into the air. The emissions are seriously harmful to the environment and need to be controlled in every way possible. The main way you can cap this is by keeping deliveries to a minimum.

Good, friendly printing practices will make sure various orders are delivered on the same delivery round to decrease the amount of pollution their wagons are causing. They will also try and order as much stock as they can to avoid various trips from their suppliers daily, weekly or even monthly. Deliveries should really be kept to a minimum.

 

Limit Wastage and Paper Usage

Technology has evolved massively and is still continuing to do so, but this doesn’t mean that print is by any means dead. Businesses will still be producing a lot of printed material. Although this isn’t good for the environment, it’s mightily effective and can still have a real difference.

One way you can make your printed marketing more eco-friendly is by limiting how much you actually get printed. A lot of businesses will have plenty of spare copies printed as back up, but do they actually need them? We advise you to only print exactly what you need to limit your wastage.

Plus, during the design phase, businesses will be more likely to use a lot of paper drawing up their plans. But as technology has evolved, there are more effective ways to do this now. Digital drawing methods allow you to see a more accurate representation of what your products will look like, so we encourage you to try and incorporate that into your next printing project to limit waste and paper usage too.

 

Change Print Habits

Use digital print technology to print corporate and marketing materials on-demand – where and when they’re needed – instead of printing large volumes to then find something has changed and it’s redundant.

 

Make Sure You Treat Print Sustainably and Ethically

As the printing industry is inherently non-environmentally friendly, you’ll need to compensate by making your business more ethically correct and efficient. There are plenty of ways in which you can easily do this when it comes to your next print project.

Not only can you choose to opt for a sustainable, environmentally friendly printing company, but you can also make changes to your own business too. Whether it’s your own recycling scheme or your company culture, it’s all in our downloadable guide for you to have a look at and address your team accordingly.

If you’re not sure what they are, download our free pack below. It contains everything you need to know on how to operate in a more eco-friendly, ethical way.

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