The Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
The buying of printing plates used to be a matter of balancing price and quality expectations. The three main players, Agfa now Eco3, Fujifilm and Kodak, catered to a wide range of customers from commercial printing to newspaper printers. They offered, and still do offer, plates of undeniable quality and value, because that’s what their customers demand. The manufacture and supply of printing plates remains a pretty cut throat business. But things have gotten more complicated lately.
This isn’t the place for a long exposé on how the plate business has evolved in the last few years, but it’s enough to share three basic facts. The most influential driver has been China’s rise as a manufacturing power. Chinese government support has essentially subsidised a slew of new plate makers and suppliers. This has created an uneven playing field for companies who don’t get government help. The second key influence is rising environmental awareness: today’s customers want products that are environmentally as well as economically sustainable. The third factor is our collective responsibility to manage emissions and mitigate climate change. All three have muddied what used to be fairly straightforward considerations for printing companies: value for money, consistent quality and reliability of supply. Today’s print buyers demand both quality of services and environmental accountability.
Buying locally is one way companies can reduce their emissions: less transport means less energy is used to get products from makers to buyers. Localised printing plate production helps manufacturers and their customers committed to cutting a plate’s carbon footprint. The emissions associated with transport have to be included in footprint calculations, so it makes sense for printers to buy plates as locally as possible. For Europeans this would mean Osterode and Wiesbaden in Germany, and for US customers Columbus, Georgia Obviously things are not so neat and tidy, but for environmentally conscious buyers, it’s a basic starting point. And if you sign a contract for plates, you expect your decision to invest in local manufacturing to be respected.
What you don’t expect is small print that says your plates might be produced somewhere else, somewhere say like China or Brazil. The transportation emissions footprint you’ve so carefully worked out based on using locally produced products is no longer accurate. It’s even dodgier if the small print references an ISO standard such as ISO 12635 to support claims of reliable and consistent quality. ISO 12635 has nothing to do with quality, the word doesn’t even appear in the standard. ISO 12635:2021 Graphic technology – Plates for offset printing – Dimensions lays out requirements for the dimensional properties of offset printing plates, not their quality.
Something fishy or what? The manufacturer concerned is not Chinese or Brazilian. Mixed plate sourcing is fine if you can trust the quality of the product and don’t care about its carbon footprint. Citing ISO 12635 is no guarantee of product quality.
So if you are committed to a sustainability policy that your customers believe, take care not to mislead them. If you knowingly accept products made in China or Brazil and thus with a substantial transportation emissions footprint, you must declare this as it will affect your customers’ carbon footprints. There is also the manufacturing footprint to consider. According to European Aluminium, in Europe the carbon footprint for primary aluminium production is 6.7 kg of CO2 per kilo. In China it’s nearly 20kg per kilo. And 91.8% of aluminium smelting in Europe is done using renewable hydroelectric power (2024); in North America it’s 93.6%. In China 69% of aluminium smelting uses energy produced from coal.
So take care when signing plate contracts, especially if you claim to be an environmentally sustainable printing business. For the sake of the planet and of your clients’ supply line sustainability buy local.
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This article was produced by the Verdigris Project, an industry initiative intended to raise awareness of print’s positive environmental impact. This weekly commentary helps printing companies keep up to date with environmental standards, and how environmentally friendly business management can help improve their bottom lines. Verdigris is supported by the following companies: Agfa Graphics, EFI, Fespa, Fujifilm, HP, Kodak, Miraclon, RicohSplash PR, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.
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