Blue Rhino Graphics, Inc. started screen printing garments in 1996, our first inks we used were water-based. I’m not going to lie, the design we printed on our first big job totally washed off the garments! Water-based inks take so much more energy to cure and clean up from that whatever benefit the ink has on the environment is pretty much negated when it comes to keeping it on the garment, keeping the stencil sharp in the screen and final clean up can be torture on everything involved.
We quickly turned to the promises of plastisol. If a job was not finished, say one box of the garments shipped from the warehouse were the wrong color and needed to be traded out, the printing would have to wait to complete the next day. Plastisol inks can remain in the screen overnight without drying giving us the availability work on something else while waiting on the shirts to arrive. Not the case with water-based inks, once the catalyst is added, that mixed ink needs to be used within a few hours and then it will dry to a firm plaster-like texture. If left in the screen it will cement into the the openings, essentially ruining it for any further prints. Cleaning that out takes some harsh chemicals to break it all loose and you can’t just rinse that down the drain.
It didn’t take reading an article with comments from Dr. Patrick Moore from Greenpeace on the subject to discern the pros and cons, we were fast learners on this one because the two scenarios I described are indeed genuine. The tale of two inks is that they both tend to be unfriendly to our environment only in different ways. So in that case, why not choose the ink that’s friendlier to the work environment?
Water-based ink does give an incredible soft hand to white cotton garments and the more they’re washed, the softer the print gets. That is the biggest plus for the product. One major drawback though is that water based ink is not opaque enough to show up on dark color garments. Black t-shirts are still the most popular shirt coming out of our shop. The solution for that was thought to be discharge ink. But I know poison when I smell it so that idea left the building almost as quickly as it came in. Discharge inks are loaded with formaldehyde. I hate to say that we’ll just leave garment printing with discharge ink to the Chinese but sadly, they’re only killing themselves with that stuff.
The biggest positive for environment with plastisol inks, they can be scooped out of the screen a put back into the can and reused. That’s huge!
IMPRESSIONS Magazine posted a really great article in April of 2015 that describes a little more in depth the pros and cons on the subject using some thoughts given by Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. You might be surprised by what he has to say on the subject.
You can find the article at this link.
Thank you for stopping by, we hope to print for you soon!
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