Green Pages

Printing and the Environment:

Must one sacrifice quality for the environment?

We at Thomson-Shore maintain our high quality standards while using recycled materials and recycling materials we would otherwise waste. Let us explain and illustrate to you how we achieve this:

Employee and Office Recycling

If you took a tour of our facilities you would notice containers throughout our plant that are identified by the type of materials that should be put in them. For example, one container collects plastic cups or bottles, while another collects paper scraps. In our cafeteria you find containers for cans, plastic goods and paper trash. At every office desk, there are two waste paper baskets, one for recyclable items and the other for non-recyclable trash. We use recycled inkjet and laser printer cartridges and save our used cartridges for future recycling. Each employee at Thomson-Shore makes the effort to contribute to our recycling program and it has been a great success.

Manufacturing Recycling

Lets move to the manufacturing side and show you how we have taken the lead in our industry to help preserve our environment. The following is a listing of items that we used that are recycled and/or environmentally friendly. You will also notice the responsibility that we have taken upon ourselves to recycle materials.

  1. PAPER: 63% of titles we manufacture are printed on recycled paper. In order to meet the EPA standard for recycled fine paper grades, the manufacturer must use a minimum of 50% waste paper. Thomson-Shore recycles 100% of our waste paper from the products that we produce.
  2. INKS: 100% of the black text ink used is vegetable based. Vegetable based inks are considered more environmentally friendly than petroleum-based inks and release less VOC's (volatile organic compounds). These VOC's are considered hazardous to the atmosphere. Petroleum based inks have approximately 40% VOC's compared to 2% using vegetable based inks. Also, 1005 gallons of ink that was waste or unusable was recycled in 1994.
  3. PLATES: 92,000 lbs of aluminum printing plates were recycled in 1994
  4. SILVER: Over 5,000 lbs of silver were reclaimed from our film developer, film scraps, and recycling old titles during 1994.
  5. SOLVENTS: 1830 gallons of solvent were recycled in 1994.
  6. OIL: 300 gallons of used oil were recycled in 1994

The above are some of the ways that we are working towards making a positive contribution to our environment. We don't claim to be perfect but we are trying hard to make a difference.

Recycling and the Bottom Line -Click here to view our income that Thomson-Shore receives from our recycling effort.

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