Articles

Part of Coca-cola’s recent announcement to be more environmentally friendly includes a campaign “to encourage people to recycle and dissuade littering”, said Nick Brown, head of sustainability at Coca-Cola European Partners. The company produces over 100 billion plastic bottles per year and is making a massive contribution to the plastic littering plaguing the planet, so…

As we all know, process control is fundamental to every aspect of the circular economy. But publishers, printers and all other players in media supply chains can only benefit, if they can work out a solid business model and make money from it. In order to do this several structural elements must be in place.…

When it comes to claims relating to environmental certifications, always question the source. There has been a glut of announcements recently by manufacturers claiming that their products are certified to international standards. One ink company is offering products that meet the Cradle to Cradle standard, a standard which has been invented by a group in…

Marks & Spencer, a global retailer best known for knickers, socks and divine foods, has recently reported on progress with its Plan A. The 107 environmental commitments enshrined in this plan were originally outlined in 2014, with a goal of achieving them all by 2025. So far 64 have been achieved with a further 25…

The work on ISO 21331, the ISO standard for assessing the deinkability potential of printed matter, is mired in industry politics. However the market really doesn’t care a jot and is moving on regardless. This is a problem for the maneuvering politicians in the paper industry because it means that the market is shifting further…

There are plenty of organisations offering to sell you an ecolabel of some description. But many of these are self-certified labels that actually have little meaning. Their adjudicators are happy to take your money, but do little to make any real difference to the environmental impact of products and services. It’s only cosmetic and it’s…

Working out if it’s better for the planet to communicate in print, or to do it digitally just got easier, sort of. ISO standards developers working on documents for graphics technologies, have written a document for calculating the carbon footprint of electronic media. ISO 20294 is moving into the final stages of its development and…

By all accounts the textile printing business is set to explode, thanks to digital printing technologies. For instance Fibre2fashion, analysts for the fashion industry, reckon that in 2017 the amount of fabric printed digitally will be more than one billion square metres and reach 2.5 billion square metres by 2020. They estimate that CAGR from…

The problem is not unique to digital presses, but how do you measure energy usage and the overall energy efficiency of a machine? With cars the most usual method is the miles per gallon, or how many litres of fuel it takes to travel 100 kilometres. Just in this example we can see how slippery…