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Facts and Fiction

It's not enough anymore to just stick that little recycled symbol on a project and hope for the best. Whether you know a lot or a little about becoming more environmentally-sensitive when designing printed materials, this section will give you an overview of the three main components that bring a printed graphic design project to fruition. This overview is neither conclusive nor complete, but it can serve as a primer for beginning the education process of making better decisions. Tremendous changes are happening as our industry addresses environmental concerns. Where are we making progress? And what do we still not know?

paper

bleaching

ink

on press

You may want to download Partners in Design's comprehensive publication EcoStrategies for Printed Communications: An Information and Strategy Guide. This 27-page document addresses many of the questions and issues businesses face as they try to integrate more environmentally-sensitive design and printing practices into their communications program and includes a comprehensive glossary of terms and definitions. The contents are also available for online review.

paper

Paper, paper, paper. How much, what types and where does it go? The United States is the Saudi Arabia of paper. Each year the city of Seattle alone generates over 400,00 tons of paper or 53% of the total 750,000 tons of waste generated in the city. Over 70% of that paper comes from the businesses. Of the total tonnage, about 60% will be recycled. The rest of it makes it way to the landfill. Mailers. Brochures. Magazines. Booklets. Catalogs. Packaging. The list goes on.

--American Forest and Paper Institute

Nationally, paper makes up nearly 44% of America's discarded consumer waste. It is the largest single waste contributor to our ever-shrinking landfills. Yet, as a nation, we recover and recycle a mere 28% of that paper waste. To understand the enormity of the recycling endeavor, let's use Seattle as an example. Because of the enormity of its consumption, paper use offers a good place to start to reduce. The City of Seattle divides its paper into 5 catagories - Newsprint, Corrugated/Kraft, Computer/Office, Mixed Paper and Other Paper. While the first three are fairly self-explanatory, the last two need some clarification. Mixed Paper is a catch-all grade of recyclables that includes groundwood (news, magazines, catalogs), kraft (bags and boxes), containerboard, ledger/CPO, and miscellaneous (junk mail, egg cartons, etc).

Other Paper is paper that for any number of reasons (technical limits and lack of markets are two examples) cannot be recycled. This category includes waxed and poly-coated papers, and packaging papers contaminated with food, hazardous materials and other substances. Take note that this is the area which would be the most specific and different in your recycling area, so you may want to do a bit of local research.

Is there a market for this paper? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The market value of paper depends on its fiber length, strength, availablity and degree of contamination. Because of the abundance of pulp and paper mills here in the Pacific Northwest, newsprint, corrugated magazines and computer/office paper all have strong regional markets. The relatively "clean" computer/office paper which requires little or no deinking, brings the highest price at $195-205 per ton. Mixed Paper comes in at $0/10 per ton. This disparity comes from the very limited domestic capacity we have available for recycling this mixed bag of paper waste and few cost effective ways of separating out the high grades.

Virtually all Mixed Paper here in Seattle is sent overseas to Pacific Rim markets. There, high grade materials like magazines are sorted out and many, surprisingly, find a market back in the US. Most paper manufacturers, responding to increasing demand, now offer quality recycled stocks. To avoid spending the tremendous amount of energy and resources necessary to export our paper waste (and in many cases, purchase it back as new products), businesses who produce printed materials need to play an increasingly important role in pulling their weight by creating a domestic market for this mixed waste.

To effectively close the loop, depending on where you live, you can pretty easily purchase recycled paper products for your home and business; as a business person designing or specifying paper for even just one project, you have, in the aggregate, increased your purchasing power many times over. But be wary of claims that a recycled paper "meets EPA or federal requirements." Guidelines issued by the EPA in 1988 state that writing and printing papers procured through federal purchases - just 2% of the paper purchased nationwide - must contain a minimum of only 50% waste paper. The other 50% may be virgin fiber. And more specifically, the waste paper content can include any of the following:

mill waste

clean, unprinted paper or board, such as converting cutting, envelope clippings and reject or obsolete paper.

materials that have been printed, coated or processed, but have not been used in their finished form, such as printed scrap and trimmings from publishers and printers, and second cut cotton linters. Preconsumer waste must usually be cleaned, bleached and/or deinked prior to recycling.

materials that have passed through consumer use and have been recovered from the waste stream through recycling, such as checks, mailings and office waste. Postconsumer waste must also be processed before recycling, but what is important to remember here is that postconsumer waste is paper that will be burned or buried if not recycled.

Lay a grocery bag down next to a sheet of printing or writing paper with a brightness level of 90. One is rough, stiff and brown; close in appearance to the pulped wood chips from which it was made. The other is soft, pliable and bright white; most probably the result of a multi-staged bleaching process containing chlorine compounds. The steps required to go from grocery bag brown to brightest white are perhaps the single most damaging process in the production of pulp and paper.

While the increased use of recycled paper with postconsumer content has begun to funnel some of the mountains of paper waste we generate into reuseable products, the continuing reliance of North American pulp mills on chlorine bleaching systems presents the communications, packaging and design communities with their next challenge. Do we need to give up white paper or can the industry provide workable alternatives to chlorine-compound bleaching?

Bleaching agents are added to pulping operations in stages-usually according to each mill's own specific recipe. Well into the 80s, chlorine gas was the bleaching agent of choice for most mills for obvious reasons-it did a great job of whitening the pulp, enabling papermakers to achieve higher and higher brightness levels. Most market pulp today is bleached to a degree of brightness that was just not possible 20 years ago.

In fact, the classification of paper into its common categories, ie "Premium", No. 1", "No. 2" etc. is done primarily by evaluating brightness and opacity. This labeling system which equates value with brightness has undoubtedly contributed to the increased specification of papers with the highest brightness levels. In actuality, since brightness is based on light reflectivity measured in a controlled setting, once a sheet exceeds a level of 80, it is not likely to be perceived by most people to be noticeably brighter in daylight or typical reading conditions.

The problem with chlorine begins when it combines with organic material [wood fiber] under extremely high temperatures-as it does in paper mills and in the carburetor of your car-to produce a whole range of organochlorines-synthetic compounds almost unknown in natural systems. Dioxin is probably the most well known organo-chlorine as well as one of the most toxic. Remember Agent Orange, DDT and PCB? They all contain dioxin, a known carcinogen, linked to a whole range of reproductive disorders, maligancies and birth defects in fish and animals, and increasingly thought to play a role in suppressing immune systems.

As concern over the production of organochlorines grew, mills moved from using chlorine gas to a variety of chlorinated compounds such as chlorine dioxide and sodium hypochlorite. While these minimize dioxin formation by almost 80%, they are still far from benign. Their use produces a whole variety of unknown-and often unnamed-organochlorines measured collectively in AOX (adsorbable organic halogen) levels.

Part of the onus of organochlorines is their tendency to bioaccumulate. By the time we eat the large fish, that ate the smaller fish, that ate the tiny fish, that ate the snail, chlorinated compound levels can have reached concentrations of hundreds of thousands of times greater than when they were measured in the sediments where the unsuspecting snail was feeding.

Pulp mills use and discharge millions of gallons of water each day, diluting dioxin to often non-measurable levels. But chlorinated compounds are synergistic, creating more damage together than they do separately. Thus, it is misleading to judge the health of our waters by a non-measurable level of dioxin in one mill's wastewater. For example, bleached kraft mill effluent is responsible for about 40% of the dioxin contamination of the Columbia River here in the Northwest, to the detriment of eagles, otters and other river-dependent animals, because there are 10 or more mills located on the Columbia, each one probably discharging "non-measurable "levels of dioxin.

Consumers in Sweden, West Germany and Austria are leading the demand for Totally Chlorine Free (TCF) paper - a market that European mills are scrambling to satisfy. To compete in these foreign markets, and pass import standards, American mills need to meet these standards.

In 1993, elemental chlorine consumption by US paper mills fell by 50%, largely due to this industry-wide shift to meet ECF standards. The route most American mills have taken, however, is retooling their plants to solve the dioxin problem with chlorine dioxide substitution, known as Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF). However, TCF proponents claim that eliminating chlorine altogether is the only way to put an end to the toxic by-products.

The EPA's recent Cluster Rule may make things even more complicated. This legislation proposes to limit effluents from America's paper mills, and is the first-ever attempt to address air and water emissions simulataneously. A mill's effluent limits would be based on their combined AOX discharge. This could present a real challenge for mills still bleaching with any chlorine-based chemicals. Since the ultimate goal for both ECF and TCF technology is a closed loop system where everything is recycled, known as Totally Effluent Free (TEF) technology, a continued dependance on chlorine-based chemicals will hinder and lengthen this process considerably.

There are alternatives to chlorine compound bleaching. Oxygen, ozone and hydrogen peroxide all bleach by oxygenation not chlorination. These methods can easily produce a sheet with a brightness level of 80. However, since most virgin pulp operations in the United States have invested in retooling their plants for ECF bleaching, switching now to ECF would be at an additional expense since the two technologies are not substitutable. In addition, there are acknowledged ways to reduce the need for chlorine bleaching, such as better washing of the pulp and longer "cooking" of the fibers to remove as much lignin as possible at an early stage; and reducing or eliminating defoamers that contain dioxin precursors. These processes are routinely used for rebleaching deinked fiber, and are often labeled as Processed Chlorine Free (PCF), which means essentially that no new chlorine has been added to the bleaching and pulping of the virgin fiber but there may be dioxins present in the recycled content of the pulp.

Perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves is how white is white enough? Once you know the consequences, that bright white sheet starts to look a lot less attractive.




 
deinking

You design an annual report on raspberry-colored cover stock and creme text and print 1 million copies. People look at this annual report, rip out or copy the financial pages, and either recycle it or throw it away. If they live in the Seattle metro area and they throw it away, it will end up in Oregon in a landfill. If they recycle it, depending on whether it's collected from their office or their home, there's a good chance that it will end up at a deinking plant.

Deinking is the process of removing printed inks and finishing materials from the reusable fiber of paper. In the last 20 years or so, the increased and varied number of new printing techniques have complicated this process. Photocopying and laser printing, flexo-printing inks, UV and heatset coatings, hot-melt glues, pressure-sensitive adhesives and FAX paper all increase the difficulty of deinking. Each deinking plant must determine, usually in strict proportions, which kinds of printed paper waste and how much of each kind they can use in their general fiber mix.

Deinking plants are complex entities and mill specific in their design, since each wastepaper grade has unique physical and chemical properties and contaminants. A mill planning to use manila file stock will have to consider that it may contain polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). A mill planning to use heavily coated grades will need the capability to handle and dispose of larger quantities of sludge. It's also fairly common for more unusual "contaminants" to show up in wastepaper bales - everything from Styrofoam and plastics to engine parts. These items can cause considerable damage to deinking equipment and if not sufficently removed, can hinder the future papermaking process as well.

There are just 19 deinking plants in the U.S. Of these only 4 sell deinked pulp on the open market at about $600-800 / ton (compared with $400-600 / ton for virgin pulp). The other 15 are integrated mills whose facilities feed their own systems. Only three commercial paper mills now have deinking plants of their own: Cross Pointe Paper , Simpson Paper and P.H. Glatfelter (see Resources).

A new deinking plant can cost close to $65 million to open. Obviously, there must be a clear market for a mill to undertake such an enormous expenditure. Economically taking the lead may not necessarily be in any one company's interest but when it becomes established as a baseline need, it collectively becomes in everyone's best interests to participate. With Americans generating roughly 600 pounds of paper waste per person each year, and landfills filling up, deinking plants have the potential to divert much of this waste and process it again for a second use.

The deinking process has been used in papermaking for a long time. But developments in deinking technology are increasing rapidly. A new deinking plant that opened in 1993 in Oregon has in effect created a market for coated printers' waste with heavy coverage (more than 50% ink on the trimmings) and FAX and laser paper by developing a proprietary process for removing these contaminants. Some 300 tons of usable fiber are being recovered from these paper wastes that would have otherwise gone to a landfill.

Cross Pointe Papers, a midwestern mill that has been deinking since 1915 likens the basic process to putting clothes in a washing machine, adding soap and water, and turning on the agitator. After a while, the water drains out. If your machine is working properly, the dirt goes out with the water.

It is the final part of this analogy that has kept deinking plants from being fully embraced by consumers as environmentally beneficial. Many wonder if deinking printed paper creates many of the same environmental problems as virgin papermaking. In fact, deinking plants require far less energy in their operation than do pulp mills, fewer chemicals and no toxic solvents.

Virtually all contamination in deinking sludge is a result of the pigments, dyes and chlorinated compounds that were added to the paper during its original bleaching and printing processes. If any whitening of the new fiber is necessary, deinking plants use either oxygen or hydrogen peroxide, compounds that bleach by oxygenation, not chlorination.

The European floatation method of deinking is fast becoming more widely used in America as an adjunct to the inital washing stage. Floatation works by routing the pulped paper waste through aerated tanks. The ink particles attach themselves onto air bubbles in the tanks and are separated out.

Most sludge produced by deinking plants ends up in privately owned landfills. It's usually a mix of fiber, ink, and clay and titanium dioxide and is generally considered nonhazardous, although this can vary from state to state and each mill must verify their operation. Sludge can be handled by incineration and ash disposal or landfilling (procedures which require that the sludge be tested for toxicity, ignitability, reactivity and corrosivity and for leachable forms of heavy metals). If it is determined to be nonhazardous, the sludge can be directed to beneficial reuses such as concrete, road filler and building materials. Some sludge is currently applied to farmlands or treefarms as a soil supplement, but the operation is hindered by the uncertainty of future liability due to potential accumulation of PCBs or heavy metals.

Since no current disposal method is ideal, keeping toxins out of the paper that will eventually be deinked seems like the best way to ensure that a non-toxic sludge will result. Perhaps the most environmentally-sound use of wastepaper is recycled paper made from nondeinked postconsumer waste. No rebleaching is used and the pulp recovered is taken directly out of the consumer waste stream.

 
ink

There is a dizzying array of printing inks, each formulated for a specific printing process and specific substrate. What they have in common are their three primary components: pigment, vehicle, and binder.

The pigment, a powder, carries the color; the vehicle is a liquid that allows the pigment to be applied, and the binder attaches the pigment to the substrate being printed.
oil content The use of vegetable oils as vehicles in printing inks is not new. They were quite common before the use of coated papers and high-speed, heatset web printing became more widespread in the 70s - a process that required fast-drying inks with solvents that evaporated quickly. Now, vegetable-oil inks are back and the reasons for specifying them - and the benefits - are often unclear.

The primary advantage of specifying a vegetable-oil lithographic ink is that it has a significantly lower volatile organic compound (VOC) level. VOCs are primary contributors to air and water pollution, as well as being a hazard to pressroom workers. If you choose a vegetable-oil sheetfed inks, the VOC level can be as low as 0-1%, compared with upwards of 25-40% for their petroleum-oil equivalents. (The VOC rating of an ink using EPA Method 24 is roughly equivalent to the percentage of petroleum-oil solvent in its formulation.) Additional benefits come from using oils, derived from a renewable resource, which is safer in its extraction, transportation and refining processes.

In Canada, canola oil (literally, "Canadian oil") has become the replacement solvent of choice. Canola is widely grown in Canada. Here in America, because of extensive marketing by the American Soybean Association, soybean oil has succeeded in dominating the market. In fact, any of a variety of vegetable or fruit oils-from corn to walnut to coconut - can replace the petroleum content of inks and individual presses have their favorites.

Currently, flexographic and gravure inks cannot be formulated with any of the known vegetable oils. For heatset web inks, vegetable oil content will be lower than in sheetfed, since in heatset, ink dries when oil evaporates from the paper. For coldset web (news), which dries by absorption, some inks are now completely vegetable-based in their oil content.

In press performance, vegetable inks offer many benefits. Ink hold out is better, resulting in less dot gain. Since the oil is lighter in color, ink colors are brighter and cleaner. Trapping and ghosting are less of a problem. But because vegetable-oil inks are high in solids which draw water to them, they can have longer setting times and less rub resistance.
pigment Besides its oil content, an ink is made up of close to 50% pigment, traditionally derived from petroleum byproducts, metals and clays. Over the years, most of the toxic heavy metals which are known carcinogens such as lead, cadmium and chromium have been replaced in lithographic inks, mainly with carbon-based substitutes. Lead chromates, however, are still found in flexographic inks used for packaging. And metallics and fluorescents, which are 70-80% pigment, always carry heavy metals.

But litho inks do still contain barium, copper, zinc, aluminum, manganese and cobalt; and certain colors have the possibility of exceeding current EPA threshold levels for these elements in their most common formulations. (Note: Irregardless of whether an ink is vegetable or petroleum-based, its pigment content will be the same.) For more on colors that exceed current EPA maximuns on copper and barium, download Partners in Design's publication True Colors? Copper and Barium in PMS Colors.

When these elements break down under acidic conditions (as they can in landfills) or when they mix with solvents (as they do during washup on press) they can become a cause for concern when deinke or buried in landfills. When printed solid waste is buried in landfills, the heavy metals can potentially leach into groundwater and eventually into tap water. To compound the problem, incineration (the favored method of treating solid waste in many areas) concentrates the heavy metals in ash residue and what's not captured by adequate convertors can result in air-to-water pollution.

Barium and copper, although not classified as true heavy metals, can, in certain forms, produce effects like heavy metals. Barium is federally regulated as a toxic constituent (TC) and copper and zinc are acutely toxic to aquatic life in certain forms. Zinc is a necessary component of metallic golds, bronzes, and tinted shades; aluminum is present in silver and gold and manganese and cobalt are routinely used as drying agents.

It is infinitely better to encourage research and development among ink manufacturers for nontoxic pigment substitutes than to hope for ideal containment conditions in landfills and incineration plants. For local information of disposal of ink and classifcation of hazardous waste, contact your State Department of Ecology.

Specification of ToySafe inks (alternative non-heavy metal based formulations) is an option, and the cost is comparable except for some of the warmest reds and Process Blue, but ToySafe inks present compromises in gloss, color, and light-fastness. Ultimately, until ink companies can develop workable alternative pigments, nonspecification of the potentially toxic colors may be the best way that designers can keep these questionable ingredients out of the waste stream.




 
on press

The printing industry is a major source of acidic and alkaline waste from the chemicals used in making film and washing press equipment. These alcohol fountain solutions, and cleaning solvents used by printers are an even more troublesome source of VOC emissions in pressrooms than ink. The most common solvent - isoproply alcohol (IPA) - is 100% VOC and is extremely volatile. More than half of all VOCs emitted from the sheetfed pressroom are from IPA.

In Southern California, as well as in New Jersey, New York and Illinois, stringent legislation currently limits daily VOC emission levels from printers to a per day maximum. Clearly, this is a serious pollutant. To simply keep their presses running, this has forced one-third of the American offset print industry to switch to alcohol-free or alcohol substitute printing.

Many printers here in the Northwest and in Canada are voluntarily making the decision to go alcohol-free before regulations are imposed. It is a long and expensive process, requiring a shop to fit presses with new blankets and rollers, test substitute products and perhaps most importantly, gain the support of press operators, who are used to relying on alcohol to solve many ink-and-water balance problems. (IPA is a very forgiving additive which overcomes numerous dampening system problems.) Running alcohol-free thus requires increased operator skill and customer patience during as substitutes improve.

The results of making the transition, however, can be a significantly more healthy worker environment and upwards of 90% less VOC emissions. Alcohol-laced fountain solutions are kept away from the wastewater stream and less ink is required for each job, because color reproduces more strongly under alcohol-free running.
waterless printing Waterless printing is another more environmentally benign option becoming more widely available. Also known as "dry" printing, waterless printing eliminates all fountain solutions, substituing instead hollow rollars containing a cooling solution that controls color evenness. Waterless plates (produced with traditional film seperation methods) also eliminate fountain solutions, and allowresolutions of 300 to 600 line printing. When combined with recycled papers, waterless presses also perform better providing less linting and stretching, truer inks colors, better traps and less make-ready.
direct imaging With the iminent onset of direct imaging-digital images taken direct from a prepress system onto a dry printing plate - the next wave of printing technology change is about to begin, with all filmaking and chemicals, including fountain solutions eliminated. Line screen resolution maximum is expected to be about 150 - perfectly adequate for most projects.

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