‘Not only are standard polyurethane/polyester boards made from petrochemicals, but the production of them releases incredibly harmful chemicals into the environment. Put this with their typical lifespan and it is clear that there is definite room for improvement on how boards are made.‘

It looks like the James Otter approach to this problem has been without compromise in all repects, the finished boards look amazing and have now been thoroughly tested on our Cornish coastline. In addition to producing an incredible product there is (at the time of writing) an invitation to the customer to be a part of the creation process. In my opinion it would be well worth making the most of this opportunity.

I would like to think that one day I might get to own one myself, although this would require finding the time to use it, getting back in the water again is high on the agenda but screen printing, right now, seems to be taking up every waking moment. Speaking of which the T shirts….

An obvious choice, Earth positive Organic T shirts screen printed using water based inks. Only the best for Otter Surfboards.

Water based screen printing inks were used to print this T shirt for our web of life, an obvious choice for these scientists who are presently researching the effects of an alien moth on our conker trees. Okarmas 100% organic Tshirt is a substantial premium weight shirt which has excellent print properties.

For those requiring organic T shirt printing on a budget we have an offer on the earth positive range of  T-shirts. Advertees specialise in water based T shirt printing.

Easiway systems inc. seem to have found a formula which is quick, effective and more importantly a biodegradable, low odour product which is less hazardous to work with.

Dip tanks, used for reclaiming screens, have been filled will all manner of chemicals over the years, nearly all giving off vapours as they evaporate, this makes the work environment unpleasant and unhealthy to be in. Easistrip has none of these associated problems, and its effectiveness in producing a thoroughly clean and degreased mesh makes the screen making process a breeze. We have been using the system for nearly 3 months now, we have found it to be quick and clean.

It is pretty much essential to have a streamlined solution for screen reclamation, hours of work can be saved in this department. Poorly reclaimed screens will potentially cost a printer time later in the process too.

2011 update: This solution is working extremely well for Advertees, surpassing our expectations. A reliable supplier for the easiway system is Dave Renton http://www.nesms.co.uk

The more use we make of water-based inks, the more we realise some of the benefits offered from a production point of view. In the first 2 months of 2010 we have seen significant growth in customer enquiries specific to water based inks (and surprisingly further enquiries from fellow screen printers) .

This is an incredibly positive start to the year, even to leave the environmental benefits out of the equation, screen printing with these products sees added customer satisfaction and a very high rate of return custom. Many of the prominent online T shirt printers have now stated they offer this service, lets hope this continued growth in interest and use of water based inks will lead to faster product development, and availability.

We have been using a fair amount of NF super white of late too, the ready mixed white is a definite improvement on previous whites we have used. Promotional T shirt printing using organic T shirts, and water based inks is now getting easier in terms of shirt, and ink availability. Manufacturers are doing a great job of supplying improved products for this market. We are hopeful the efforts in product development within this area will be maintained through the current economic climate. These ‘green’ agendas, are bringing improvements in environmental and ethical standards within the T shirt and ink manufacturing industries, we also believe these efforts are bringing an improvement to overall print and product quality.

Every now and then we come across T-shirt prints which have all the qualities we like, water-based printing is a must, good design for screen print is another plus.

T shirts which are organic, or at least sweat shop free are always good. The T shirts featured tick all these boxes, a promotion for a UK tour of, The Present, a new Thomas Campbell film. The follow up to surf films Sprout, and The Seedling  covers West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Sumatra, Java, Hawaii and California. For more information about the film and the venues visit thesurfscreen.com.

Looking at the featured surfers and locations this is probably going to be another classic, we can’t wait to see it.

The tour dates and venues are:

* Wednesday 22nd April  The Royal Cinema, St Ives
* Saturday 25th April The Sallis Beeney Theatre, Brighton
* Friday 1st May  The Carnmarth Hotel, Newquay
* Saturday 2nd May Woodlane Theatre, Falmouth
* Saturday 9th May The Lighthouse Centre, Poole
* Sunday 10th May The Cube Cinema, Bristol
* Saturday 16th May Braunton Village Hall, Braunton
* Sunday 17th May  The Reel Cinema, Kingsbridge
* Saturday 23rd May St Merryn Village Hall, St Merryn

Screen printing light colours on to dark T shirts is unlikely to become environmentally friendly any time soon (our recommendation to anyone who has a strict environmental policy is to print on to lighter T-shirts using clear water based inks) but discharge screen printing is one of the options being touted as a better alternative to plastisol inks. The majority of manufacturers supply a solution which contains small traces of Formaldehyde, they also uses heavy metals. These formulas are notorious for their unpleasant odours, and the required wash before wear label is a no no for most retailers.

Magnacolours have produced an alternative to these products, a discharge ink free from Formaldehyde and heavy metals. The NF formula performs very well, t-shirts printed with this ink can be worn immediately, the print has a soft hand and good colour. We have used then when printing by hand and on the auto, they are very user friendly in both situations. The draw backs are the same as those experienced when using products that use Formaldehyde . Very long curing times are required (but no flash curing, so not necessarily less energy efficient), and we think there is also an unpleasant odour, despite the manufacturer claim “No harmful or distracting odors in the workplace”.

The ink only has a limited life of 4 hours, but an organised workshop should have no problem dealing with this. The lifespan of the ink does create waste, if ink use cannot be determined accurately. We think discharge is not a suitable solution for smaller orders. This is a shorter working time than traditional ZF formulas.

So overall the Non Formaldehyde inks seem to be the right choice when discharging T-shirts.

Some of the reasons to choose NF discharge.

• No formaldehyde added during discharge process.
• No harmful or distracting odors in the workplace.
• Garments can be worn immediately after printing-without washing or warnings.
• Super soft finish with excellent color fastness and durability.
• PVC, Phthalate and APEO free formulations. Meets all key international environmental
standards, see Technical Data Sheets for details.
• Superb discharge and color development on suitable garments.
• PC color mixing system support.
• Low viscosity inks print easily on manual and automatic presses.

Delivery of a new gas dryer has held things up a little this week, but all being well we should be up and running again by the weekend. Once this oven is fired up we will be able to process water-based orders far more efficiently. T shirt prints such as theweboflife.org.uk will be done in half the time, this design was printed on Okarma organic cotton T-shirts using Grafco clear water base.

Environmentally sound T shirt printing was the request from TANC. So we supplied the Earth Positive T shirt, printed using an opaque water based ink. Find out more about open cast mines and plans for new coal at the TANC website.

Now classed as a retro look, fluorescent T Shirt Printing is synonymous with the 80′s. It is not a regular customer request, but now and again it crops up. The key to a good quality fluoro prints is underbasing, the pigments are not very opaque and a good white background is essential. For the T shirt print in the above image we put down 2 whites before printing the fluorescent green and magenta, the colours consist of an opaque water based binder with 10% pigment. Good quality pigments are always advisable.

Cromatex 2000 is made by Grafco and supplied by Screening West

This job was printed on organic T shirts from Okarma, and printed using water based products. Geeks in the basement was produced for a competition winner and will be flown out to Oz! So although these T shirts are printed using environmentally sound methods, the air miles clocked up by them will make a nonsense of it. First and last time we ship this far I am sure.

Discharge screen printing is one water based solution for light prints on dark clothing or textiles. It ticks the environmental printing boxes, but it is not without it’s limitations. Firstly we would not use this method for printing orders of less than 50 T shirts, the reason being the ink has a shelf life of less than 24 hours when mixed, this means there is waste on small orders or in a situation where ink use cannot be predicted accurately. Ideally we like to see print runs of 100+ for this process. Another draw back is in its ability to reproduce accurate colour across a range of different materials, discharge ink is a bleaching agent which when combined with pigments will colour the shirt, unfortunately the underlying colour of the garment to be printed is rarely white and will affect the final print, the underlying cotton colours that are most often found are pale blue, pale cream, pale pink, all will have a grey tone to them. Quite often black T shirts can be stock that has been re-dyed, so a T shirt may have been coloured red originally and later changed to black, a batch such as this can be problematic when using the discharge system.

It is not possible to use discharge printing on synthetic materials, an 80% cotton content would be the minimum requirement in our opinion. True whites are hard to achieve, and good bright reds are also very difficult to make permenant and these are things to consider when designing for this process. Greens yellows and blues are bright and permanent. Although an organic solution for screen printers discharge printing will need a wash before wear label.
Despite all the draw backs of this technique there are some circumstances where it excells, the final print has no discernable texture to it after the first wash and can be ironed over.

Having outlined a few of the main differences between plastic and water-based inks in a previous article we can now take a look at some more factors which can help us make decisions about what inks to use for our T shirt printing. Water based inks require better time management. Drying in the screen is one of the biggest draw backs of  waterbased screen inks, for the big workshop running large orders it is helpful to be able to leave a complex multicolour set up on the machine overnight, if a screen gets damaged it may take time to prepare a new one and get the press running again, the last thing a busy shop running to deadlines wants is to have to strip the entire job down wash out the screens and set up again because of one hold up.
And for the smaller operator it is equally frustrating, lone operators often need to leave the press to talk to customers and answer phone calls, they do not want to have the stress of getting back to the screens before all the detail on even a single colour job is lost to drying ink. Precious time is easily lost washing out screens drying them and setting up again. None of these problems are had when using plastic inks, so what incentives do we have to move more print jobs to water based inks? One possible reason is health

All solvents are potential health hazards, they vary in their levels of toxicity, and can penetrate into the human body by three paths:

The respiratory tract

The skin (through unprotected contact)

The digestive system (only if swallowed!)

Limited exposure to most solvents is not going to damage your health, depending on the individual solvent. However, the affect of solvents on health should not be ignored, as continued exposure can lead to any of the following:

• Irritation of the skin, eyes and mucous membranes

• Respiratory problems

• Headaches, dizziness, nausea

• Light-headedness

• Effects to the nervous system

• Blood, liver, kidney diseases

• Carcinogenic effects

The degree of damage on human health varies but for screen printers the duration and frequency of exposure is very high.
These products have an equally negative impact on the environment, and some inks manufactured in the UK and America still contain ingredients which are banned for use in European products. I think most screen printers are possibly aware of the health hazards, but when faced with the prospect of slowing the press down most T shirt printers will put these issues to the back of their mind, especially with the tight margins we are often required to work to.
The problems of a water based workshop can be overcome, waterbased inks have improved tremendously in recent years, and the quality and the variety of the prints that can be achieved should see them being considered for more jobs, more frequently.

Hopefully we can outline some of the benefits of T shirt printing in water based inks, and explore some of the possible reasons many screen printing companies are so reluctant to advertise or use these inks. Here are just a few benefits we feel waterbased inks have to offer.

• Environmentally sound non spirit based formulas
• Breath-ability on large prints
• Soft and sometimes imperceptible hand
• Very long lasting print
• Diverse range of special effects

and to make sure we represent the choice of screen printers who do not like to use these products, some of the negatives

• Shorter shelf life
• Ability to dry in screen if left
• Breaking down of screens on long runs
• Mixing of pigments and binders time consuming and messy
• Longer cure times required

This is a small list in regards to both the pros and cons, and the reason we are dealing with this complex subject in more than one part. Firstly we want to know why waterbased inks were ditched so readily by the screen print industry in favour of plastic inks?
Plastic inks were a major breakthrough and the answer to all the major problems screen printers were experiencing in their workshops, the industry adopted these inks for faster production times, enhanced opacity on dark garments, the ability to leave complex multi colour jobs set up on a machine overnight and faster curing times, the benefits were there for small scale business and the major manufacturers alike. By the time I came to screen printing in the 1980′s waterbased inks were never used for T shirt decoration, and it was not until coming to work for Advertees in 1991 that I discovered water-based inks. I was surprised to learn that in some instances, even prior to recent advances in ink technology, these inks could produce far superior results to plastic. So fast forward 17 years and very slowly the notion that plastic may not be good for us and the environment is beginning to take hold, yet weaning us off this wonder stuff, I think, is going to be a long and difficult process.

‘At the invitation of the Ashaninka Tribe, Cool Earth is now to working to protect the western frontier in Peru from destruction.’

On Sunday 10^th February, the Ashaninka community met with loggers who were presenting their final offers, those offers were rejected by the chiefs who chose to form an agreement with Cool Earth. The project to raise funds to protect 50,000 acres of pristine forest launched on 1 July, 2008.

While some T shirt suppliers  suprise us with mid year price increases, others, namely Earth Positive look like closing the price gap on the non organic brands. As many companies start passing on rising fuel and energy costs to the consumer, Earth Positive will start to see a return on their investment in alternative energy sources. Meaning organic Promotional T shirt printing will not cost the earth.

It seems Cool Earth has found itself at the centre of much controversy and debate. Recent campaigns aimed at increasing awareness about the importance of the rainforest, and the rapid rate at which it is being plundered, generated interest on a massive scale, and some people are upset by their approach. Our opinion as T shirt printers is perhaps not worth that much, we support what cool earth are trying to do. Preventing rainforest from being destroyed.

Organic t shirt printing

“Thanks for the T shirts

Green GoFors go Global!

Just to keep you updated – the green GoFors are a group of Cornwall College students who are studying responsible tourism and are keen to go for carrying out good green deeds!  Our first green activity was the beach clean, we are off to Fifteen today to discuss creating an activity sheet to go on the back of the kids menus with a green theme relating to responsible behaviour on the beach – in September we’re going to help install a windmill on one of the holiday parks etc etc and in November two of the group are going to represent UK colleges in Nice for their work on responsible tourism – we were selected from all the colleges who participated in the UK  – so the Green Gofors are up and running and actually going global!”

Although not ideal in all situations, and the ink a real nightmare to work with at times, water based screen printing can be extremely satisfying. This month has seen a big increase in jobs produced with water based inks, some customers have even changed their original ideas to suit the process. Companies buying Promotional t shirts for the Royal Cornwall this week have been taking the greener option too, with both Okarma and Earth Positive T shirts doing well.

The Environment Agency “5 June 2008 is World Environment Day and across England and Wales we’ll focus on how we can all Stand-up to Climate Change.”

This day is to encourage people to adopt new routines in dealing with the seemingly inevitable, climate change. Adapting to the difficulties presented by a changing climate, and slowing down of the process.

“Such a daunting topic requires a fresh approach – and we’ve got that too – but you’ll have to wait and see what it is. All we can say for now is … it’s time for a new routine.”

We will be waiting, I wonder what it could be!?

T-shirt printers organic

As ever students leave you with very tight deadlines, the final big day for many students is here, and most will still be working on their projects with seconds left on the clock. We are seeing a much better understanding of the processes involved by students, and a more realistic take on what to expect in the way of costs. Maybe I have spoken too soon, next year could see us inundated with unreasonable requests, but this year was good, we enjoyed it.

water based T shirt print, formaldehyde free. promotional t shirt printing