Environment
A newspaper cannot come into being without paper, chemical substances and ink. The consumption of electricity and water is also indispensible to the printing process. The responsible application of stock and energy is of high priority to our enterprise, especially given the aspect of the reduction of the carbon dioxide emission.
The Süddeutscher Verlag Zeitungsdruck GmbH accepts this ecological challenge. As we are a service provider of a leading media group we evaluate the individual processes of the newspaper printing according to the friendliness to the environment. This gives rise to a holistic consideration whether the used materials and application flow is harmful to the environment or uses unnecessary ressources. If necessary they are substituted by ecologically friendly materials or applications. In the year 2006 we were awarded by the Bavarian Ministry of State for Environment, Health and Consumer Protection, for contributions to health and environment.
Concerning protection of resources as well as energy saving and reduction of emissions and waste we have achieved considerable success:
For many years the pages have been directly exposed to the printing plates. („Computer to Plate“/CtP-technology), thus we reduced our use of films, film developer, and water. Furthermore we reduced the wastage of water by 50 percent per printing plate through improvement of the CtP-facilities. The printing plates are recycled for their aluminium.
We can apply ink more economically via adjustment to 4c-technology and via automatic ink supply and therefore produce in a resource friendly and waste saving manner. The remote ink control enables us to reduce the waste rate. The fabrication of the printing ink we use is carried out without toxic heavy metal pigments and the current legal exposure limit to the trace content is more than complied with.
Our newsprint consists of up to 100 percent recovered paper. Waste paper is seperated into eg. white waste, general printed waste and so on and this waste is then recycled.
For cleaning our rotary press we solely use low volatile cleaners free from aromatic compounds in self-acting cleaning devices. Thus we save not only considerable amounts of cleaner and cleaning rags, but also the efficient application and the low volatility of these products lead to fewer emissions.
The used cleaner is reprocessed by ultrafiltration, as a consequence we can reuse the reprocessed cleaner as if it was the original cleaner. Because fewer cleaning agents have to be produced for us, this ultrafiltration enables us to cut down on chemical substances, energy and as a consequence emissions of carbon dioxide. We evaluate the emissions of carbon dioxide for printing products with the aid of the the carbon dioxide software of the „Bundesverbandes Druck und Medien“ (bvdm).
The carbon dioxide software allocates carbon dioxide equivalents to the used substances and production steps. Beyond that the software takes into account the amount of deployed plant and machinery, their maximum input power as well as the configuration of the machinery and equipment for certain steps of production and service operation. Furthermore the staffs´journey to and from work, necessary business trips, as well as routes of transport of the used working materials and waste, incurred during production, are integrated into the calculation of the carbon dioxide software. The software considers the different transport media und their different ecological evaluation.
If you have questions or helpful suggestions please don’t hesitate to contact us.
