WHY LETTERPRESS
BEING GREEN

Not only do we hold a passion for all things vintage at Emma Jo, we are also passionate about doing our little bit for the environment too.

DESIGN
All of our design work is created on screen and we use electronic mail for proofs and storage, so very little paper is used.

PAPERS
Our papers are chlorine free and are made from 100% cotton fibres. The cotton that is used in paper making is the part of the plant known as cotton linter. This part of the plant is not suitable for use in textiles, but is ideal for paper making. Therefore the fibre used in 100% cotton papers would otherwise be an unused product. We also collect all guillotine trimmings from the print room and are sent for recycling.

PLATES AND TYPE
All printing plates are recycled, once they have been used and finished with, they are melted down and the materials are used again to make new plates.
Where traditional hot metal typecasting is used the printing materials are recycled in-house and reused.

PROCESS
All printing is executed by hand. In addition to the benefit of fine control over the end product hand feeding produces minimal stock wastage.
All 'start up proofing' stock is reused many times reducing waste further.
All printing waste is ultimately recycled.

INKS
Inks are rubber based.
Water based inks are the most eco friendly but give poor results in letterpress.
As a trade off we do not use the ink fount on our machines, instead monitoring and adding ink direct to the inking drum. This minimises both usage and waste.