Food safe inks

Welcome to print.coop, the ink-on-paper pages from specialist printing and design co-operative, Calverts. We produce high quality, economical and sustainable, commercial print. We're experts in the latest and best litho and digital printing technology, as well as traditional craft applications. We know almost every commodity grade or 'designer' FSC® or recycled paper on the market, and can tell you about the most cost effective formats.

our approach

Why work with Calverts?

Print buyers come to Calverts for four main reasons - our creativity, quality, expert advice and track record in sustainable printing.

We have proper conversations with our clients, to help them realise their print ambitions - from fairtrade teaching tools and low carbon travel guides to art and science comics and high end books. There's almost no print idea we can't turn into reality.

We have a hard-earned reputation as 'green' printers. We're always investing, learning and sharing what we know about every aspect of low environmental impact communications.

And Calverts worker co-operative business model means we're able to improve continuously, by putting our money into state-of-the art repro and printing hardware, software and training - instead of paying dividends to outside owners and shareholders.

All this adds up to higher quality, higher impact print; timely delivery - and a better print experience.

Get in touch and we'll help you print something beautiful.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Standards & certification

Design and print affect the environment. Calverts has therefore implemented an environmental management system to the requirements of ISO 14001 to reduce our negative environmental impacts.

We are committed to comply with or exceed the requirements of environmental legislation and other environmental initiatives to which we subscribe. We are also committed to the prevention of pollution and continual improvement.

Our objectives are to:

1) Reduce our carbon emissions

2) Reduce the impact of paper use on natural resources

3) Improve resource efficiency and recycling

We have set up programmes to achieve this with targets and time scales.

Find out more about our environmental initiatives.

Vegetable Inks

Food safe ink

Although the UK's Food Standards Agency has said there's no firm evidence of food safety risks related to mineral oils (from ink) in recycled food packaging, the recent furore around this issue suggests that manufacturers are sufficiently concerned and will review and alter their packaging.

The question is this: why are newspapers, which make up the majority of recycled content in cereal packaging, still being printed with mineral oil based inks? Wouldn't be sensible and less costly if all newpapers were printed using vegetable oil inks?

Calverts has been successfully using vegetable oil inks for over a decade on our B2 Heidelberg Offset Litho press and we're pretty sure that had Jordans, Kelloggs, or any other illustrious cereal manufactuers used our recycled waste sheets containing vegetable based inks to produce their packaging then this problem of contamination would never have happened. We're aware that the low amount of waste we produce might not fulfil Jordans and Kelloggs requirements but the offer is there.
Do get in touch.

Dedicated cereal eaters, cake makers, food manufacturers and switched on print buyers might also be interested to know that the (Simitri) inks used on our new Konica Minolta Biz Hub 8000 digital press are 100% food safe. Find out more about printing with food safe inks. These greener digital inks are manufactured by polymerisation rather than the conventional kneading or pulverizing method, which achieves:

Reduction in Greenhouse Gas emission of 32% for carbon dioxide and 40% for nitrogen oxide.
A reduction in sulphur dioxide emission reduction, a cause of "acid rain", by 42%

Furthermore, Simitri inks requires less toner to be applied to the paper and oil free fusing is achieved at lower temperatures. This significantly reduces the power consumption of the digital press whilst delivering exceptional print quality.

Download Food Safe Certification