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You have just worked with your designer and printer to produce your latest marketing piece on environmentally friendly, FSC or SFI certified papers. Is this all that you can do to make your printed piece more environmentally friendly? Most definitely not! What about the ink selection.

It is important to make sure that the printing ink used is just as earth-friendly as the paper. We must consider the three main components of offset ink for sheetfed printing: pigment, the vehicle and additives.

Pigments are what give the inks their colors. They are mixed with a vehicle, a moist substance, such as petroleum, water, soy or other vegetable oils that ease the spread of pigments and provide more even color. Additives, such as waxes and distillates are added to help reduce set off and improve the ink’s performance on press.

Petroleum-based inks gained popularity more than 50 years ago because they were fast drying and cost effective. The problem is that the drying process is damaging to the environment. Petroleum inks are not only made from a non-renewable resource, but they release Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) as they dry, which is one of the causes of air pollution that contributes to global warming.

Under current regulations it is required that petroleum inks release no more than 30 percent VOC, and this is where the new vegetable-based inks can be an effective green alternative. Now formulated for 2–15 percent VOC, vegetable-based inks are made of a mixture of renewable resources, such as soy, flax, canola or safflower with the oil from each plant giving the vehicle its own unique advantage.

Soy ink was developed after imported oil shortages threatened many industries that depended on petroleum-based products. Though soy has been marketed as the new green printing ink, soy-based inks are not purely made from soy. Soy oils are combined with linseed and chinawood oils for better drying times because soy oil by itself would not be able to keep up with today’s deadlines. To be called ‘soy ink,’ the ink only has to contain a minimum of 20 percent refined soy oil.

All inks, including vegetable and soy-based inks, still produce small quantities of VOC because they contain small amounts of petroleum to extend ink pigments. Without petroleum oil, more heat would be needed to dry the inks and more energy would be used in print shops.

There was once concern that vegetable-based inks lacked vitality on press. Even though petroleum-based inks produce a sharper dot, vegetable-based inks have been shown to have a much better ink holdout, less dry back, and as long as you allow for the slightly added dot gain in prepress, your results will be just as vibrant, if not better. Whether printing on coated or uncoated sheets, and particularly on synthetic papers, technologies have quickly resolved some of the quality problems once associated with vegetable-based inks.