Our friends at Lightning Labels just posted some good news about a more energy-efficient ink manufacturing process, developed by HP for their digital printers. The new equipment to manufacture HP’s patented liquid ink technology, ElectroInk, reduces energy needs by 40%. Lightning Labels has two HP-Indigo digital printers and is using almost twice as much ink as last year.
Digital printing (which makes variable data printing possible) is growing at a very fast rate, so energy conservation is a good green effort. I would also like to see the chemical makeup of these inks green up, as liquid inks used on conventional presses have done with new formulations containing greater parts vegetable oils to replace petroleum.
Lightning Labels
HP
ElectroInk