Laurel Brunner: Environmental partnership is the way to go

If you are serious about improving your environmental impact, partnership may be the way to go. It can even have additional unexpected benefits for your business, unrelated to the main project. Partnering works not just between developers, but also across the developer/customer divide. Toray and Seacourt Printing, a UK printing company, have been working together on a new printing system to reduce Seacourt’s environmental impact.

Toray is a huge company which derives a €10 billion income from synthetic and carbon fibres, plastics, films and chemicals, as well as waterless printing plates. This is the product for which Toray is best known in the graphics business. Waterless printing eliminates the water or dampening solutions used in conventional printing processes. Printing plates designed for the waterless process have a special silicone rubber coating that is ink resistant, repelling the ink from the plate’s nonimage areas.

Toray has been working with Seacourt Printing to develop the LightTouch printing system. LightTouch combines Toray’s waterless plates with specially formulated UV-curable inks and LED drying, to create a world first. Seacourt Printing’s use of this technology combination is part of the company’s strategy to cut its overall environmental impact. The company has saved over eight million litres of water since it first put the LightTouch system into full production, and its Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) emissions are down by 98.5% over the last few years.

Seacourt has been pushing waterless printing since 1997 and has strived to continually improve the process, launching LightTouch in 2015. The company has worked closely with Toray on this project. Both parties have invested the extensive time and resources to develop an innovative and effective system. LightTouch delivers improved environmental impact because it’s waterless and uses LED curing. LED curing uses much less energy than conventional curing technologies, so Seacourt’s energy emissions have also come down. Seacourt claims that the process delivers high quality performance as well as environmental sustainability.

Waterless printing has additional benefits. It removes the additives and chemicals required to manage water on press using water and dampening solutions. So by using the LightTouch process to produce its prints, Seacourt is minimising on press chemicals and waste as well as saving water. And the UV inks dry immediately so there is no need for offset sprays or sealers. This all saves money as well, and will do so long after the partnering project is done. The relationship with Toray has clearly paid off.