Yesterday I wrote a post entitled How Green is Your Printshop that covered some of the green initiatives from suppliers that are being seen at drupa. One of the responses to this entry came from Alex Fisher The PR Officer of Ingede. His comments are printed below.

It is "a lot easier to recycle paper" - yes, if it has been printed with offset or gravure or dry toner. But not if it has been printed with current inkjet. This is the discrepancy at this year's drupa: Green and inkjet are the main topics, but they do not match. Waterbased does not necessarily mean environmentally friendly. Because many waterbased inks cannot be recycled.

This is especially true for inkjet inks, no matter whether they are dyes or toners. They are not only unrecyclable for new graphic paper - even in small amounts, inkjet printed papers can spoil a load of recovered paper dedicated to be recycled for new newsprint or office papers. The current inkjet inks dissolve in the process water and dye it like a red sock (or here black sock) in the white wash. There it is the underwear that turns pink, here the fibers that turn so dark that the paper screened out of this broth will not meet any brightness specification any more.

Most inkjet manufacturers close both eyes and try to ignore that problem. But a green process is not only one using a machine with a recyclable hood. It is also a process that spits out printed products which do not harm the environment. You have to think "green" not only productionwise, also productwise. Especially for high volumes with a short life that are likely to end up in the household collection. How should a consumer know that the inkjet mailing is not "green" at all? Probably only if it will carry a "red" label?

That might be the ultimate solution that legislation at least in Germany already provides - to mark products that do not fit in the established paper recycling system. Imagine a printer having to label every product leaving his shop as unrecycleable, as harmful for the recycling process? Which customer would want to buy these products? So better think twice what kind of machine you think is an "environmentally excellent printer".

For many people Ingede is an unknown organization , however it is a key player in the greening of our industry. Leading European paper manufacturers founded the "International Association of the Deinking Industry" in 1989. The current members are 40 paper mills and research departments of paper mills from Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and the UK.

What are the goals of INGEDE? - Today recovered paper is recycled to produce cardboard, packaging paper, office papers, newsprint and hygiene paper. In the future more recovered paper can and should be recycled, also for higher quality graphic papers recovered paper can be used as a resource. In order to keep these products light, to avoid them getting darker even going through multiple recycling, the ink has to be removed: the recovered paper goes through the deinking process. This process should harm the environment as little as possible, and it should also lead to a high quality product. To achieve these goals, everybody involved in these steps has to cooperate.

Ingede is certainly not happy about the situation with inkjet printing. It is saying that the new high-speed inkjet presses that are being promoted for newspaper production and direct mail are heading us towards an ecological dead end and pose a danger to the paper recycling process. The full text of this can be seen in a press release from Ingede - http://www.deinking.de/ingindxe/press/pr0801.html. This release was published in January this year and I am not sure whether some of the newer inkjet technologies that use a binding agent to stop ink being absorbed into the paper improve the deinking process by allowing the inks to be more easily separated from the paper.

It is also interesting to note from the post that HP have put on the PrintCEO blog site entitled "The Inconvenient Truth about Solid Ink, The Polar Bears Have Spoken" that Xerox's green solid ink inkjet technology where the ink does not dissolve in the recycling water appears to have some 'non-green' aspects in its use of power. Perhaps we should just stick to good old dry toner!