Mortsel -- Agfa Graphics continues to strive for reduced carbon footprint in its products and worldwide operations. With small corrective measures of various nature, considerable reduction of waste can be achieved.

Agfa Graphics' Azura and Amigo printing plates use the market leading ThermoFuse technology. This allows printers to drastically reduce the use of chemistry and water to prepare plates before going on press. Now, with the new packaging design, Agfa Graphics further reduces the energy used for transportation and the waste generated when unwrapping the plates.

"It sounds like little steps, but our industry is moving in the right direction, " said Frank Van Damme, WW Marketing Manager for Thermal plates at Agfa Graphics. "With :Azura we offer a considerable cleaner process to our customers for producing the plates. Now we reduced the total waste of packaging related material with another 50% per m2 plate. We use less inner wrap material, less outer box material and less wooden pallets for transportation. As a consequence the total weight of the package is reduced hence lowering transportation cost, but also easier handling for loading and unloading of the plates."

Agfa Graphics strategy to care about environment was recently also rewarded in different places around the world. Two of the major manufacturing plants received local environmental achievement awards again because of corrective measures in favor of reduced waste disposal and energy consumption.