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At last year’s PrintBuyer Forum, the environment provided a lively theme both in and out of official workshop sessions. Metaphors abounded: buyers talked about the environmental issue being “as long as a piece of string”, while another described it as “a right old Pandora’s box”. “Ultimately, you can either draw a line at achievable targets, or you can pursue everything to the nth degree,” said one buyer for a large financial corporate.

“The problem with pursuing it all is that you’ll probably lose your sanity in the process.” His remarks drew murmurs of consent from the assembled delegates: the environment is now close to the top of almost every UK print buyer’s agenda, and many are grappling with the problem of just where to draw that line.

Some print buyers are choosing to take a middle course: to hit the achievable targets and then pursue the one or two more difficult objectives that are strategically important to your organisation. This is the route taken by Yael Hodder, creative and publications manager for The Soil Association – the UK’s leading charity promoting sustainable organic farming.

GM crops
The association places around £250,000 of print each year, ranging from small jobs of 500 A5 leaflets through to 26,000-membership magazines, and Hodder is keen to green up her print supply chain as much as possible.

“As an organisation we have a strong stance on the environment – we’re accredited to ISO 14001, and we have done lots of work on making sure our print is as environmentally friendly as possible,” she says. This work has included sourcing 100% post-consumer recycled paper from France, and scoring a roster of a dozen UK sheetfed offset printers on their ethical and environmental performance.

But Hodder still has an environment-related concern that she can’t lay to rest. A strong part of the Soil Association’s work is its leadership of the campaign against genetically modified crops, and Hodder has recently discovered that all the inks used in the production of her collateral are based on vegetable oils.

“This sounds great for the environment,” she says. But when she looked harder Hodder discovered that the vegetable oil in question is soy, extracted from soya beans, which are one of the world’s biggest genetically modified crops. “The soya beans that are grown for industrial use are always GM strains,” she says.

Hodder asked two of her leading printers for reassurance on this score, but received little comfort. “It seems that all our inks are made in Germany, and I’m told that means they’re less likely to contai GM oils,” she says.

But is this really the case? Paul Hayden, national technical manager for Stehlin Hostag, says not. “We, like the other big multinational inks producers, buy our oils on the world commodity markets. The industrial grades are always a blend of oils from different countries, which means we can’t guarantee their provenance.”

However, Sun Chemical’s European product director John Adkin says that only about 50% of the inks used in the UK’s offset sector are vegetable-oil based. “Web printing, whether heatset or coldset, uses more mineral oil than vegetable oil, and even in sheetfed it’s very possible to avoid vegetable oil- based inks altogether.”

General acceptance
However, by and large, he concedes, the inks manufacturers are moving in the vegetable direction. “The whole industry went that way about five years ago because petrochemical oils are running out. Partly we wanted to switch to renewable materials to avoid that drain, and also we were aware that prices would rise because of it,” he says.

The switch to vegetable oils was accomplished almost without comment: “Most of the industry accepted it and thought it was a sensible idea,” adds Hayden. There were some advantages (vegetable-oil based inks give better rub-resistance) and some downsides too (setting speeds are slightly slower than mineral oil based inks).

“The real issue was that nobody wanted to pay that much more for their inks,” says Hayden, “so we had to achieve it at a price that was similar to the petrochemical-based inks.” That meant using vegetable oils that are almost certainly derived from GM crops, purely because a GM strain can be produced faster and with less disease and more weather-resistance – thereby helping to keep its price-per-tonne low.

Adkin believes it’s highly unlikely that there are any printing inks on the market “that aren’t based on oils that are partly GM derived”. And the possibility of this changing on a mass scale is slim, he says.
“It simply isn’t within our realm of control. We, like every other company that buys commodities on the world exchange, can have no effect on those commodities,” he continues. “We can’t influence our supply chain as print buyers are doing in the UK. On the world market, if you don’t like what’s on offer, you don’t buy it, it’s as simple as that.”

Interestingly, the same GM ingredients that go into commercial offset inks also go to make up offset inks for the packaging industry. “This is a dismaying thought when you consider that many foods that are carefully grown, processed and supplied according to organic standards, may be using inks on their packaging with a GM content,” says The Soil Association’s Hodder.

John Adkin raises an interesting point of science around the use of GM materials in inks. “Although the raw materials we buy to make the inks do contain genetically-modified elements, it’s worth bearing in mind that the resultant inks, once manufactured, don’t actually have any GM content,” he says.

“It sounds a bit odd, but we use the raw materials in the production of an ink base vehicle, and as part of that they go through a high-temperature process that removes any DNA or proteins. So effectively the resultant vehicle is neutral.”

But this is only half of Hodder’s argument. “We’re creating demand for GM crops, which is not something The Soil Association wants to support,” she says. And it’s hardly an argument to suggest that a print buyer should specify mineral-oil based inks simply to avoid the GM question: print buyers are in the position of having to choose the lesser of two evils according to the strategic objectives of their company.

Hodder says she would “love to become part of a pressure group on this issue. I do appreciate the issues – the oils need to be bought in bulk, it’s not like the ink manufacturers can just nip out and buy a few bottles of sunflower oil instead. But it seems strange that we can’t offer some alternatives to GM inks. Even if we have to pay a bit more for them.”

So can printing inks be produced without GM content? Highly unlikely, says Paul Adkin of Sun Chemical. “It’s not impossible, but it would be complicated, and I’d guess very, very expensive.” It’s unlikely that Sun Chemical as a global manufacturer will adopt non-GM ink production, “because it’s only really in the UK that there is strong objection to GM foods.”

Specialist producers
But if the big ink producers are the supertankers in this GM sea, the smaller ink producers are more like nippy little speedboats. Tom Chesterton, managing director of Chancery Manufacturing, says his company already produces non-GM inks for a specialist sector.

“We take other fatty acids that don’t have a GM content, like linseed or flax, and base our oils on those,” he says.“We use resins to build gloss, because inevitably there’s some reduction in gloss level with vegetable oils, and a higher odour. But it is very possible to make non-GM content inks.”

The irony, Chesterton adds, is that a move back towards vegetable-oil based inks “is taking us all  back to how the industry was 70 years ago. Mineral oils have only been base vehicles for the last 60 years, and before that it was all plant-based”.

He continues: “With more modern manufacturing methods, and better quality raw materials, we can overcome some of the limitations of 1930s inks, but inherently there will still be some of those limitations”.

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GM CROPS: THE ARGUMENT
The Soil Association is a key contributor to the global debate on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It believes that genetic modification should have no place in the production of safe and healthy food.

Its Seeds of Doubt report, published in 2002, found evidence to support the view that “[GMOs] have not realised most of the claimed benefits and have been a practical and economic disaster”.
The Soil Association believes that widespread GM contamination has severely disrupted GM-free production including organic farming; destroyed trade; undermined the competitiveness of North American agriculture overall – where most GM crops are currently grown; and increased the reliance of farmers on herbicides.

Monsanto, one of the four main GM global organisations involved with the production of GMO strains, maintains that GMOs are the most effective way to feed a growing world. The company claims a reduction in pesticide applications of 172,000 tonnes worldwide due to the introduction of GM crops, 10m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions eliminated through fuel savings, and that 8.25m farmers across the world are planting biotech crops.