We Need Environmentally Friendly Printing Today

It might be trendy to operate an environmentally-friendly business but, you know, it is kind of an important shift that every industry needs to start making.  Whether or not your concern for the shape of our natural world matters greatly to you, the growing public concern is one that, as a business, you have to heed.  More importantly, if you work in the printing and publishing industries, there has never been a more crucial time to make more efficient ecological decisions about your products.

Thankfully, there are many environmentally friendly Doculand printing options out there today; which means that you don’t have to do much work. Just educate yourself on environmentally printing and its benefits and then choose the right place to take your business.

But What Is Environmentally Friendly Printing?

In essence, environmentally friendly printing is a strategy to take a more sustainable approach to traditional printing practices.  Obviously, the objective is to involve practices that cause as little damage to the environment as possible while still retaining quality service.  More importantly, perhaps, environmentally friendly printing continues to pursue ways to improve these practices moving forward.  And, as you are probably wondering now, these practices might include:

• favoring digital formats wherever possible
• favoring recycled paper
• favoring recycle printer cartridges
• favoring soy-based ink
• favoring two-sided printing

Ok, but is Environmentally Friendly Printing Really That Important?

In short. Yes.  Although many traditional newspapers and other periodicals are struggling, that does not mean that print media is going away any time soon, especially in the corporate world. We still print paperwork, court documents, medical files, and school work on physical paper; and even as we continue to transition to a more digitized society, there is no indication that we will ever be completely without printing. Still, as we make this transition, it is important to continue to reduce our reliance on print media.  

Traditional printing requires a lot of energy and that energy has to be fueled by power sources like electricity and combustion engines. So while we can always recycle used paper, we are still expending tremendous amounts of fossil fuel exhaust and other pollutants whenever we use paper products. In terms of traditional printing, these pollutants come in the form of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. These can cause both short term and long term health issues; so developing new methods for printing and reducing our reliance on traditional print media is increasingly important.