Environment

How green is your plate production? With the launch at Drupa of a whole new kind of plate technology, the environmental debate has been sparked all over again. Fuji’s Brillia HD PRO-V and Agfa’s Azura V are two new chemistry free violet plates that both manufacturers claim are cheaper, cleaner and greener.

Chemistry free is not a new idea: the concept of a scrub-remove plate has been around since Agfa rolled out its 25,000-run-length Thermolite for DI presses eight years ago, coining the phrase “processless” to describe a process that wasn’t quite, but close enough, to processless to excite its target market. This was small- to medium-format commercial printers who wanted a daylight-working plate without the hassle of chemistry management, storage or disposal. When Kodak followed suit in 2005 with the Thermal Direct Non-Process Plate and Fuji made a similar announcement at Print 05 in Chicago, the processless wagon was truly rolling.

Myth-busters
Until 2006, thermal was generally agreed to be the only plate technology able to carry the processless tag. But two years ago, Agfa and Fuji blew that myth out of the water, announcing at Ipex that by the following Drupa they would each have a processless visible-light violet plate. Come the day and Fuji is a little further ahead than Agfa. The Japanese group’s Brillia HD PRO-V will move into controlled sales by Q4 of this year, where Agfa doesn’t expect its Azura V (and the newspaper equivalent, the N92VCF) to reach the equivalent stage until the beginning of next year.

Kodak has chosen to absent itself from the two-horse race towards chemistry free violet, focusing instead on its thermal technologies. However, earlier this year, Etienne van Damme,  the firm’s pre-press solutions vice-president of marketing strategy and business development, did publicly commit to a visible-light plate technology using what he called "simple processing". At Drupa, Kodak also demonstrated a version of its Thermal Direct No Process plate that almost halved its predecessor’s image-to-delivery time.

For van Damme, it’s all about stability on-press, although it is interesting that both Fuji and Agfa consider stability to derive more naturally from their visible light plates than their thermal ones. Nonetheless, Kodak’s main plate development drive is firmly towards thermal.

However, back at the coal-face, it seems that processless is a misleading term to apply to violet plate technology (and thermal, for that matter) because, just like conventional equivalents, all so-called processless plates have a coating that requires non-imaged areas to be removed. Depending on the plate and CTP device in question, this processing is either done in the platesetter by filters, or by a separate, inline gumming unit that firstly preheats the plate to "amplify" or "bond" the polymers, the state of which has been changed by the platesetter’s laser, then washes the plate in a gum solution to remove the background coating and whips the plate through a dryer before delivering it into the rack.

So ‘processless’ is not exactly processless. And, in fact, even the label ‘chemistry free’ is something of a misnomer because, as Fuji’s marketing manager Graham Leeson points out, the gum applied to a ‘chemistry free’ violet plate is itself a chemical, "which needs an MSDS data sheet just like anything else". He explains: "What ‘chemistry free’ actually means is that users of the new technology have less worry about the requirements for storing and disposing of conventional CTP plate processing chemistry. It’s as close to pH-neutral as possible, but you still have to dispose of it properly."

Violet vs thermal
Both Agfa and Fuji believe they have come up with a technology that offers some significant advantages over thermal. "Violet is a low-cost and very efficient diode, which means it’s a lower capital cost and a cheaper running cost," points out Agfa’s plates product manager Mike Loose.

Agfa’s ROI calculations for the Azura V system are based on a chemistry usage of 200ml per square metre of plate, which Loose says works out around 50ml of chemistry for each plate. He adds: "If you’re paying 25p a litre to have that chemistry properly disposed of by a waste management company, the cost soon mounts up. And in some parts of the country, where water is metered and charged on usage level, the lack of water in the chemistry free process is a big advantage too."

Violet chemistry free users also benefit from a vastly simplified process compared with conventional violet processing – a notoriously difficult chemistry system to keep in optimum condition. "Operators spend a lot of time making sure the baths are clean, running at the right temperature and containing the correct strength of solution," says Loose. "They also have to keep an eye on when to drain down and change those solutions, after a certain time or a certain volume of plates. Chemistry free removes all that hassle because it’s just a gum, which is stable and inert."

As chemistry in the plate department began to die a death around the turn of the millennium, so the skillsets of pre-press operators began to change. Many who had been through apprenticeships in the days before pre-sensitised plates had a carefully learned appreciation of chemistry; but pre-press operators of the late 1990s and onwards are more computer operators than platemakers, according to Loose. "They don’t want to be bothered with messy chemicals. They want to get a dry plate out of the processor and hand it to the press minder," he says.  In these market conditions, processless – be it thermal or visible light – can only flourish.
As well as cost and method advantages, both manufacturers have argued the environmental benefits of their plates, pointing out the more efficient laser power output versus energy input of a violet laser compared with a thermal.

Against the grain
But although at first glance it looks as if chemistry free violet is set to take the market by storm, the bigger picture appears more complicated. The overall trend in the commercial market is towards thermal, with only the newspaper sector and the small- to medium-format commercial printers a stronghold for visible-light technologies.

“The commercial printer is pretty much wedded to his thermal plates," says Agfa’s Loose. "You’re not going to persuade him to build a darkroom and change the working practices for the relatively small cost and time advantages of violet."

Newspaper publishers, he says, are similarly wedded to visible-light plate technology, because they put out such volumes that the cost and time difference really does stack up. He adds: "They’re used to working in safelight. Plus you get extreme stability from a visible light plate that you just can’t match with thermal."

Like Loose, Fuji’s Leeson feels the new technology is unlikely to win hearts and minds from thermal. He says: "We see some difference between our thermal and visible-light chemistry free options, like a run-length of 200,000, double that of the PRO-T thermal plate. That might persuade a few users towards visible light. But, in general, there isn’t a significant enough advantage to one or the other to generate conversions."

Leeson also predicts a few conversions from printers with long-standing ISO 14001 accreditations, because "keeping that standard demands a year-on-year improvement, so at that level, the environmental benefits of violet might be meaningful". But really, he says, Fuji expects the majority of its chemistry free violet users to be "printers who are already using violet and want to go chemistry free, but are put off by the cost of thermal". "We’re seeing those people delaying their investment decisions to wait until PRO-V is there," he adds.

HOW GREEN ARE YOUR PLATES? ONLINE CALCULATOR

Fuji’s online calculator for resources used in a given platemaking department is attracting great interest in an industry keen to save not just the environment but also, increasingly, those ever-more precious pounds.

Users can firstly calculate the average square meters of plates used in a month (up to five different plate sizes can be factored in) and enter their typical usage rates of replenisher and developer. Finally, they enter the size of their processor, together with its active and standby hours per day, and the number of working days in the week, to get a figure for the processor’s likely energy consumption.

From this data, the calculator produces figures to show the difference between conventional and chemistry free plate technologies in four key areas: chemistry, water, waste and energy.

The calculator also allows users of Fuji’s ZAC technology to work out their resource usage. The results are fascinating. ZAC, an ‘intelligent’ processor that optimises chemistry usage, closes the resources gap between conventional and chemistry free CTP to a much scantier margin. On the back pf such results, Pureprint Group, one of the UK’s best-known environmentally led printers, based its decision to opt for conventional plate processing using a ZAC processor.
Calculate your plate processing resources at www.howgreenareyourplates.com.