Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG made environmental protection one of its corporate objectives back in 1992. The company was the first to receive the industry’s eco-certificate for its foundry in Amstetten in 1996. Since then, environmental management systems compliant with the co-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS, also known as the EU eco-audit or eco-audit), as well as International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001, have been installed at all of Heidelberg’s development and production sites. Independent experts check each year whether the company’s facilities comply with the legal requirements and voluntary commitments.

“We aim to make printing more environmentally friendly and to ensure that the public is aware of this fact,” says Dr. Jürgen Rautert, director of engineering and manufacturing. “Having pursued an active policy of environmental protection for the past 11 years, our press production processes are already very environmentally friendly. However, the focus now is on minimizing the presses’ environmental impact when in use at customers’ sites. Therefore, our developers are currently working on concepts that will keep environmental pollution in print shops to a bare minimum. Our Print Media Academy network also provides support for the implementation of appropriate production methods.”

If customers implement all the measures suggested by Heidelberg for environmentally friendly production, numerous reductions can be achieved:

•Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions generated by material consumption and printing processes can be reduced by more than 5 percent.
•Paper waste reduced by up to 80 percent.
•Energy consumption reduced by more than 15 percent.
•Waste reduced by up to 5 percent.

For the Speedmaster XL105-6+L, these reductions are equivalent to total annual savings of nearly $309,000 — without even factoring into the calculation the savings made on the press through shorter makeready times.

The biggest environmental factor in sheetfed offset printing is startup waste — no other parameter has such a big impact on a press’ environmental performance. If 600 sheets of startup waste are created on average per job, for example, a press in 3B format running in a three-shift operation creates more than 280 metric tons of waste a year. This corresponds to around 300 tons of CO2 emissions each year. The additional waste created in the postpress stage is not even factored into this equation.

Heidelberg offers a range of solutions to cut this waste, primarily through the modules of the Prinect workflow, including the Prinect Prepress Interface for presetting ink zones on the press, the Prinect Color Assistant for storing specifications for inks and paper, and the spectrophotometric inline color measuring and control system Prinect Inpress Control. Combining these Prinect modules cuts the number of pulls required during setup to one or two. This can save up to 400 sheets of wasted paper per print job, or up to 190 tons of paper a year.

The new Anicolor inking unit technology is today’s most radical solution for cutting wasted paper. It is available on the Speedmaster SM 52 platform, and was awarded the prestigious PIA/GAFT Award this year.