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These 9 Screen Printers Are Going Greener

Your peers detail the sustainable shop practices they’re putting in place.
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1 year ago

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These 9 Screen Printers Are Going Greener
  • Since we took over an already existing shop, we are phasing out all the old chemicals used here and replacing them with eco-friendly. — Nate Hansen, Hansen Screen Printing
  • At the studio, we are 100-percent water-based ink, and so our consumption of cleaning chemicals is minimal. All wastewater is filtered down to 20 microns. We recycle all cardboard, plastic, glass, metal. All our electrical is generated with hydro power. I think the fact we use water-based ink compared to the plastisol any of our competitors use is probably the biggest value we have, and our customers like that. — Andy MacDougall, MacDougall Screen Printing

    • These 9 Screen Printers Are Going Greener

  • Our studio is vegan, so the shirts and chemicals and inks are, too. This cuts out 98 percent of garments we print on, but has had a positive impact on our quality as we no longer print on cheap shirts and we feel better about what we are doing in terms of environmental impact. — Chessie-Rosier Park, Squeegee and Ink
  • My biggest failure was adding $10,000 worth of filtration on my drains. I loved it for a month. Then they were constantly plugging, clogging, backing up, and eventually one day flooding mine and multiple other units in the building. Sigh. So, we removed them. I still feel like a lot of the sustainable “buy this” options out there are profit killers or simply don’t work. There are simple attitude things you can do like recycling all plastics and scraping your screen extremely clean before washing. Re-using cardboard boxes. We do those things. We do also use the least toxic chemicals in clean up, biodegradable ink degradant, and such. But I don’t know if you could call even those chemicals environmentally safe. Maybe “environmentally better.” I hope one day to be a zero-impact shop. But for now, I settle for being a low-impact shop. — Matthew Pierrot, GetBOLD – T-shirt Printing and Embroidery
  • We recently connected with our local recycling processor to be able to submit our PET backing from SupaColor, DTF, and plastisol transfers. Sustainability is an important factor in our company’s values. We are not currently SGP certified, however we are actively researching it. — Scott Garnett, King Screen
  • We recycle everything that can be recycled. Our recycle vs. landfill volume is 4:1. We are not SGP certified. Too small a firm. — Mark Coudray, Coudray Growth Technologies
  • Sustainability is something that we have a long-term focus on. We take little steps at a time to make improvements in our process. Currently, the thing we are working on is trying to make our sales process paperless.  — Joe Ortinau, Ortinau Art
  • We care about sustainability. And do what we can. But there are things we would like to do that we cannot do. For example, our building has 500 4-foot fluorescent tubes for lighting. We would like nothing better than to change those bulbs to LED lighting. But it is impossible to afford that. — Larry Mays, Mays Marketing Group
  • I’ve championed two different shops through the SGP certification process. It’s work, but it is definitely worth it. Think about the three “R’s” – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Sustainability is more than the shirt you choose. It’s about the process you use in decorating. — Marshall Atkinson. Atkinson Consulting
    Marshall shares his 40 action items for a more sustainable shop, check here.

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