Paper

Paper accounts for most of the burden printing puts on the environment. Paper production is responsible for over a third of all trees felled, and over a third of municipal solid waste. Access Print uses recycled paper for most of our printing and copying, and we recycle all of our paper trimmings and other waste. We offer paper with a range of post-consumer recycled content, although paper with higher content is less bright and can contain visible flecks. If brightness is not a critical factor in your job, we urge you to consider stocks with higher recycled content.

Paper can only be recycled three or four times before the fibers degrade, so it’s important to consider other ways of reducing paper usage as well. Printing long documents double-sided, for instance, reduces paper waste as much as using recycled stock. Designing artwork with bleeds to fit within standard sheet sizes can yield similar benefits.

Since recycling can’t entirely eliminate the need for cutting trees for paper production, it’s also important to ensure that those trees are harvested responsibly. The Forest Stewardship Council certifies paper that has come from trees harvested according to good forestry practices; many of the non-recycled and mixed papers we offer carry this certification.

Ink

Traditional petroleum-based printing inks have high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can contribute to air pollution and other harmful environmental effects. Our offset press inks are based on acrylic resins and vegetable oils, and have about half the level of VOCs as petroleum-based inks (and a small fraction of that found in most inkjet inks). Most of our inks are free of other potential pollutants (with the exception of metallic inks, which necessarily contain some metal).

Our copiers and laser printers use non-toxic polymer toners, which are free of environmentally harmful substances.

Paper printed with the inks and toners we use can be easily de-inked and recycled again. Other printing methods—inkjet printing in particular—can be impossible to remove from the paper fibers, rendering them impossible to recycle. Recycling printed paper is just as important as using recycled paper in the first place, and our printing methods ensure that your print jobs continue to contribute to a sustainable environment after they’re printed.

Energy

Offset printing is a very energy-efficient printing method—printing a page on an offset press consumes a tiny fraction of the electricity needed to produce a page using a laser or inkjet printer.

We try to minimize the energy usage of our laser printers as well, by grouping jobs to run in larger batches. This eliminates the energy waste that occurs in many office environments, where laser printers remain fully charged for half an hour or more after each intermittent print job. And when not in use, all our laser printers enter a low power energy saver mode.

Other waste by-products

Most of our offset print runs are produced using digital direct-to-plate technology, which eliminates the harmful chemicals—and much of the energy—needed to develop traditional plates from film.

We recycle and reuse all of the cartridges and containers used by our laser printers. Our high-capacity printers use separate containers for each toner as well as for developer, fuser oil, and other consumables. This contrasts with most small office laser printers, where all consumables are typically packaged in a single cartridge. Thus our printers avoid the unnecessary waste of unused consumables associated with smaller printers and copiers.