Collating System Meets Printer's 'Green' Standards

Greenhouse Graphics has built its business on an environmentally-conscious approach to printing.

That policy has led Greenhouse Graphics to buy finishing systems from Graphic Arts Equipment (GAE).

The Basingstoke (UK) short-run magazine printer is guided by its own Ecoprint-System4, which is a series of environmental initiatives covering issues such as VOC emissions, energy usage, chemical usage, recycling and waste reduction.

To meet its environmental standards Greenhouse Graphics installed a Horizon VAC-Turbo Powercollator with SPF-200A supplied by GAE, which includes two 10-station tower collators that can collate 10,000 sets per hour and 4,000 books per hour, as well as a FC200A fore-edge heavy-duty in-line stitch-fold and trimmer system.

Greenhouse Graphics' produces local community magazines for football clubs and charities, such as St John's Ambulance.

The company's managing director, Ian Crossley, explained: "A lot of the magazines we print do like the eco-friendly aspect of our business.

When we look for equipment we assess its impact and how it will help us conform to our internal standards.

We compared eco friendliness, speed of jobs, set-up and wastage.

We also took in to account energy usage and GAE's equipment was the best choice." Crossley continued: "We have a lot of short-run magazine work so we need to be able to change jobs quickly.

It is also good to be able to take work off halfway through a run, put another job on and then go back to finishing off the first job.

The greater flexibility is one of the strengths of the machine." He explained that Greenhouse Graphics tends to print runs of 1,000 to 5,000 copies and the speed of the Horizon VAC-Turbo Powercollator has doubled throughput.

In the past where the company would have incurred overtime, the new system has meant it is not needed.

At the same time the firm can also take more jobs on that would have been refused before.

As for choosing GAE, Crossley said: "We looked at other machines but at the end of the day we felt the GAE equipment was more robust and that tipped the balance.

We needed to feel that it was going to last.".

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