sustainable relief printing

My goal was for these posters to make the least environmental impact possible within the constraints of my project: a small budget and a 16-week time limit. Here’s a look into how I decided to swap or not to swap.

 

INK

If I had all the time in the world, I would have made natural ink for this project. But I did want these posters to be archival, so I decided to work with what I had available to me in the MIAD print lab. Many of the pigments we use in art supplies are highly toxic because they contain heavy metals. Cadmium red, burnt umber, and vermilion are a few. For this reason, it’s important to keep your hands clean. It’s common to use disposable latex gloves while printing in order to protect the skin from chemicals & prevent inky fingerprints. I wanted to avoid single-use items, so I used neoprene gloves for press cleanup, switched to a cloth hand towel, and washed my hands when necessary rather than using latex gloves. I saved 160+ paper towels over the 16 weeks I was tracking my washes. I think this solution is up to personal preference– for people who print full time, washing your hands with orange scrub all day every day would wreck your skin. I wonder if these compostable gloves could work.

Some say that soy ink is more environmentally friendly due to its vegetable content, but all relief inks are actually vegetable-based. Linseed oil inks are ideal for letterpress inks since they don’t dry quickly like soy ink. 1 If you’d like to try linoleum block printing with water-soluble inks, please take a look at Cranfield’s Caligo Safe Wash! I heavily considered them, but ultimately decided against it since I would be using a Vandercook– water washup is not the way to go if you’re using a press with rubber rollers since it’ll cause them to dry out and crack.

1 Boxcar Press



RAGS & Solvent

Hazardous waste is an unfortunate byproduct of the print industry. Letterpress ink is most commonly cleaned up with mineral spirits, a flammable, petroleum-based solvent. MIAD does some recycling by using cut-up old t shirts to use as shop rags for press cleanup. That’s where the cycle ends, though. Screen printing rags can be laundered, but the rest which are soaked in solvents must be sent to the landfill. 1

Industrial laundering services like SorbIts can keep your rags out of the landfill. When you pay for their service, they’ll deliver clean rags to your business and pick up your used ones. Then, they launder the soiled rags, keeping printer’s rags separate from those used on any other kind of machinery. This may raise concern about contaminated wastewater, but SorbIts claims that they have a closed loop system. 2 Waste fluid is reused as industrial fuel and spent rags are repurposed into other absorbent products or sent to a garment recycling facility. As is typical with sustainable solutions, the downside here is the cost. Reducing your impact on the environment is great, but cutting up t-shirts is free. For small presses, it might not make sense to invest in a service like this.

Since I couldn’t change anything about rag disposal in the student shop, I decided to focus on my solvent usage instead. In order to cut down on mineral spirits I used, I started my cleanup with vegetable oil. I ended up loving this method because the oil was great at cutting through the first layer of sticky ink. Where I would normally need to go back for more and more mineral spirits and saturate several small t-shirt rags, I could stretch one good pour of vegetable oil across all four rollers.

I reduced my mineral spirits usage by 50% by introducing vegetable oil into my routine, meaning less VOC’s emitted in the lab and less hazardous waste to be disposed of.


1 How to Dispose of Used Rags and Oil Absorbents

2 Eliminate a Waste Stream



PAPER

For obvious reasons, finding eco-friendly paper can be a challenge! There are lots of conflicting labels out there that mark a brand’s quality of environmental stewardship. Unfortunately, some even serve to intentionally misrepresent the truth.

I chose to use French Paper for this project. It’s not the cheapest option, but I trust that it’s the most responsibly produced. French has used hydro-powered generators since their inception in 1922, meaning that fossil fuels aren’t in the picture. They produce a surplus of energy for the surrounding community and manufacture locally in Michigan. Each product they offer displays a variety of badges depending on its makeup– 30% post consumer waste, 100% recycled, FSC certified, hemp fiber, and so on. The Madero Beach Speckletone Cardstock I chose is 100% recycled and 30% post consumer waste.



plates

Despite the fact that it didn’t perform quite as well as photopolymer in my print quality test, I chose Marmoleum for my plate material. Since it was the largest variable I could control, I wanted to choose the most sustainable option. Marmoleum is a flooring linoleum produced by the company Forbo. It is 97% organic, 43% recycled content, and carbon neutral. The company shares lots of specific information about how their product is made whereas top manufacturers of artist’s linoleum do not.

In a printmaking context, Marmoleum performs very similarly to battleship grey linoleum. It is a bit resistant to carving allowing the artist to break & flick, and it contains no chemicals that would cause dangerous fumes when put in the laser cutter. It is thinner than battleship grey linoleum, so press users will need extra backing. One major benefit I found is that marmoleum does not kick up dust in the laser cutter like battleship grey linoleum does– instead of flying around, the dust clumps and stays put against the plate. This was a game changer for me because I needed to cut many large plates, a job which would take around 10 hours of laser time. If I had used battleship grey linoleum, I would have needed to clean the laser cutter every 30-40 minutes or else risk breaking the optics due to dust buildup. (replacing this part is expensive, and I don’t want to break a community machine!) Long story short, using this material instead saved me a lot of time.

The downside is that Marmoleum is difficult to source in the USA. I reached out to construction companies and flooring supply stores, but wasn’t able to find any that didn’t come with a huge shipping fee. I bought mine from Lowe’s, but I could only purchase it in tiles– this wasn’t ideal because I needed to remove the material from the backing and then apply it to a different backing in order to get it to type high. (on the plus side, buying it this way was very cheap compared to battleship grey linoleum!) I discovered marmoleum from the blog of Colin Blanchard, a master printer in the UK. He prefers this material over any other for his intricate nature linocuts and he purchases it at his local carpet supply. Forbo is a European company, so I imagine it’s easier to track down the product across the way.


backing

The “make-ready” process inherently involves recycling, though it’s for practical moreso than environmental reasons. Very slight differences in pressure will cause a significant change in the appearance of a letterpress print, so pieces of paper are used in order to adjust the pressure precisely. In this image, I’ve cut several pieces of chipboard to match the exact shape of the pink Vandercook seen in poster 5. I did this because I wanted to increase the pressure exerted on the image and decrease the pressure exerted on the negative space, ideally giving me a sharp image with no scan lines or chatter.

You might notice that the back of my block looks pretty banged up! This is because of the aforementioned Marmoleum tile issue. When I realized that my printing substrate would be a quarter inch thicker than expected, I could no longer use the 3/4” MDF I had ready to go. I had chosen MDF because it has a consistent composition and it’s easily reusable for many projects, but I had to buy a new backing material that was 1/2” instead.

With the limited budget I had left, I bought 1/2” cork backing. I took that cork backing and stuck it to one plate, printed a run of posters, then pulled it off and stuck it to the next. This is the tenth plate. I don’t recommend trying this. The cork is definitely biodegradable, but it’s too delicate and spongey to hold up to much pressure. It broke every time I removed it from a plate, and the way it squeezed upwards when I locked it into the press bed made me worry that it was moving under the pressure of the rollers. I’ll be glad not to use that again.