Green Printing Practices | Recycled Holiday Cards

As trailblazers in the environmental paper and printing movement since 1995, you can trust that we know our materials and methods.

The materials you use is the first step -- but are printing methods also worth considering?

In professional printing there are the chemicals and inks. None of this does our planet much good.

INVITESITE USES VEGETABLE BASED INKS. We use vegetable based (linseed oil) inks, which contain more renewal ingredients, plus have greatly reduced VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), to the great relief of anyone who breathes, especially press operators. The letterpress printing process uses very small amounts of ink, less than half a teaspoon of ink for the average printing job.

CLEAN-UP The other chemicals used in printing, specifically the cleaners, have improved also. When we started in the industry we used gasoline, kerosene, acetone, and just about everything that stinks. All this has changed, but the ink itself has the largest impact. When the Los Angeles Times switched to soy-based ink, they reduced their VOC emissions by 200 tons per year and won an air quality award from South Coast Air Quality Management District.

LETTERPRESS PRINTING. All of our Holiday Cards are decoratively printed by Letterpress. We'd like to point out the happy coincidence that the most beautiful form of printing is the also the most eco-friendly industrial printing you can get. The machines we use are 100 years old and still running strong. They are slower and efficient and use little electricity. Because the paper is hand-fed, there is almost no paper waste, unlike an automatically fed offset press and many digital presses. The roller and inking mechanism is simple and straightforward, so that cleaning the press has about ten per cent the environmental impact compared to cleaning an offset press. Because the making of letterpress plates is time consuming, and because of the care taken in feeding a letterpress, letterpress is more expensive than our other forms of printing, so it's not for everyone.