Reducing the Waste with Conscious Printing

Printing can be very wasteful. The paper comes from trees, petroleum based inks let out volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can damage the environment and the process of making paper is not very pleasant. But when we need to do brochure printing or business cards printing, or whatever else we need to print on paper, our businesses need to be able to do that. Without everyone using a PDA of some sort, there is no way to go completely paperless. What are we to do in order to keep our business and personal needs met and still keep our environmentally sound desires satiated?

Of course, the ideal of a paperless society is a long way off, and we may never get there. We can't produce enough sustainable wood products to meet all of our paper demands, but there are a few things we can do to help reduce the environmental impact. We can make sure our printers use recycled materials and we know what type of recycled material they use, we can make sure they use soy based ink, instead of petroleum based inks and we can make sure their paper comes from a mill that uses less water, contains their waste, and uses fewer volatile chemicals in their production of paper. We, as consumers, need to hold our printers to green printing practices.

There are two types of recycled material for paper, pre-consumer and post-consumer. Pre-consumer recycled material means that the wood chips from the wood mills (ie, sawdust, etc) is used in the production of the paper. This is good to use, but not a big shift from what they were already doing. The better type of recycled material is that used post-consumer. That means that you and I read the paper, we then put it into the recycling bin, it gets carried to the mill where it is shredded, pulped, and turned into new paper. A certain amount of pre-consumer wood is usually used to give it more strength, but we want a high amount of post-consumer paper used as well.

VOCs are damaging to the environment. Besides, we need to cut our reliance on unsustainable materials, like petroleum. Soy is a better solution. You can shred up the paper with soy based inks and feed it to your worms, spread it on your compost pile for bulk, use it as cat litter or bedding for small animals and much more. All these things would be dangerous with petroleum based inks.

The first two options are easy for you to check into. The last is not so easy. We often do not know what the mills do. We do not know if they dump their hot, chemically laden water into the river their next to. We don't know even what mill the paper came from most of the time. As consumers, there is not much we can do here, but the business owners that deal with these mills can insist on clean practices. They can refuse to work with mills that do not lead environmentally sound practices. And they can let us consumers know that they expect their partners to follow environmentally sound practices. The problem is, they need to define what is environmentally sound. What they call environmentally sound, I may not agree is such a great practice, but that is another article.