Tech Talk – Ship & Shore Environmental Cutting Emissions in the Print Industry

Attractive eye-catching packaged product helps keep merchandise moving from the shelves. Multicolored, high gloss, laminations, and dimensional printing techniques all conspire to draw the consumer in for purchase. Food, pharmaceuticals, bulk packaging, paper, film, and corrugated materials all seek to gain a competitive advantage through unique and highly visible packaging.

Ink or coating materials are chosen to create the best finish effect and print durability. Typically, solvent-based or water-based coating materials are used. Although both coating types contain solvent material, water-based materials have significantly less solvent content. It is the solvent based printing operations that emit large amounts of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) that are the focus of regulatory agencies and generally require abatement controls.

Why do we control these emissions?

VOC emissions that enter the atmosphere combine with nitrogen oxides and UV rays (sunlight) to form smog that has been proven to cause respiratory health problems. Other solvents have been classified as Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) and have been shown to be cancer causing. And of further note, the capture and treatment of Ozone emissions from corona treatment equipment has found its way into recent permits and subsequently into abatement equipment. These emissions are also unhealthy and very corrosive to surrounding plant equipment.

The goal of any well-designed printing facility is to mitigate these emissions by implementing add on abatement controls. Typically, thermal oxidizers are used in this application. Principally Regenerative Thermal Oxidizers (RTOs) are installed to minimize the impact of coating emissions in a cost effective way.

Solvent emissions are emitted to the atmosphere in a variety of ways from printing operations.