(1888PressRelease)
July 16, 2008 - North Quincy, Massachusetts - In 1995, Air Graphics introduced its Greenprint® service in effort to reduce its carbon footprint and provide greener reprographic service for its clients in the architectural, engineering, construction and design community. With its recent conversion to a 30 percent, post-consumer recycled stock, Air Graphics has taken the bold step of offering recycled material as the only option for its reprographic services.
“We didn’t enter into this decision lightly, it literally took months of investigation and study,” said Mike Cully, president of Air Graphics. “We placed samples of both regular and recycled paper in front of a wide variety of customers and in all cases, our customers could not tell the difference.”
Air Graphics runs in excess of three million square feet of white bond paper through their large and small format devices every month. With the introduction of recycled bond for both large and small format copies, Air Graphics expects to save in the course of a year:
● 1,600 trees
● 4,619 lbs. of waterborne waste
● 679,722 gallons of wastewater
● 75,278 lbs. of solid waste
● 148,056 lbs. of greenhouse gasses
● 1,133,333,333 BTU’s of energy
Such a significant reduction in energy and environmental impact represents dramatic improvements in the production of “blueprints”. The original blueprint process, developed by the British astronomer Sir John Herschel in 1842, involved a solution of ammonium ferric citrate and potassium ferricyanide coated onto paper. After exposure to strong light, these chemicals were converted to insoluble blue ferric ferrocyanide and subsequently washed off with water. The subsequent improvement invented during World War II—the diazo process—was more efficient but equally unfriendly to the environment.
Only after the introduction of the large format bond printers – imagine your desktop laser printer growing to be five feet tall – it became possible to reproduce large architectural drawings without creating an environmental hazard as a byproduct. That’s when Air Graphics introduced the Greenprint® to replace the blueprint.
“Bond prints were hailed by our clients as a great technological advancement and we subsequently shut off our diazo machines shortly thereafter,” said Cully. “The design community is especially sensitive to actions that impact our environment so we’re confident that our customers will embrace this move, if they even notice a difference at all…but at least we’ll know it’s the right thing to do”
For more information about Air Graphics and its range of services, you can visit http://www.Airgraphics.com.
About Air Graphics
Air Graphics has been an independent provider of reprographic services to the architectural, engineering, construction and design community since 1987. It’s Greenprint service, designed to reduce the company’s carbon footprint on the environmental, is a registered trademark and has been in place since 1995. With locations in Quincy, Watertown, Boston and Portland, Maine, Air Graphics offers the full spectrum of reprographic services, including: color output, large and small format, finishing and binding, file prep aration, Planwell™ Enterprise Training and file uploads. For more information, please visit http://www.Airgraphics.comor call (800) 734-3373.
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