Colonial Printing

These days as the world realizes the need to save the earth, people of every field are trying their best so as to contribute in their field like the printers these days are asked whether they use the soy inks. The print buyers have the assumption that the usage of soy inks is environment friendly. But the whole answer towards going green in the printing industry is not the usage of soy inks.

The printers who have taken the strain to be environmentally friendly are working on the process of removing the material or the hazardous chemicals in their press rooms. The inks and dyes used these days are intending to avoid the usage of lead, chromium, silver and they are trying hard to eliminate the usage of the volatile organic contents. Further they are trying hard to have a complete check over the wastage mechanism. As far as the eco friendly criteria are to be considered, the above mentioned criteria have to be taken into account.

However, when the environmentally friendly aspects are concerned with the printing industry due importance is given to the usage of soy inks. The popularity of soy inks has grown few years ago when it was used as a replacement for the petro chemical oils. Soy beans are available in large quantities, so they found its usage to provide considerable contribution in the field of printing. The inks used in the printing industry owe considerable significance as there are many more vegetable oils finding their utility in the printing inks. Some of the other vegetable oils are linseed, cottonseed, vernonia, sunflower, tung, linseed and even canola.

The different printing inks which are used these days fall into three broad classes:

Sheet- fed inks: The base oil in the inks which is used in the sheet fed inks is linseed oil. The benefit which the linseed oil imparts is that the facilitates a good flow to the ink and it even converts into solid over a period of time. In order to reduce the drying time additives like cobalt and manganese octate are used. As time passed by there was more usage of petroleum products to be used for drying thus replacing the vegetable oils.

The news inks widely use the soy inks because of their method of drying and the physical characteristics of inks. The soy inks have gained enough popularity with the news inks because of the EPA concerns on the petroleum based inks. The American Soybean Association has been very active in establishing the minimum content of soy oil to be used.

The manufacturers of the heat set ink these days are replacing the usage of the linseed oil with soy oil. These days they are aiming at replacing one vegetable oil for another, the heat based inks are dried by the action of heat. The soy inks dry at a slower rate than the other types of inks. But it is important to note that the soy inks are actually more expensive than the petro chemicals but people are less concerned about this because they weigh the environmental concerns as more important.

shijina
http://www.articlesbase.com/printing-articles/going-green-with-printing-inks-755220.html

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