Areas of intervention for cleaner technology in the Danish printing industry — focus on wastewater problems

The objective of the project was to point out and prioritize areas of intervention for cleaner technology in the Danish printing industry, with a focus on wastewater problems. The processes, chemicals etc. included are estimated to cover more than 90% of all professional printing production in Denmark today. The main tool used for appointing and prioritizing areas of intervention for cleaner technology was a scoring model combining environmental hazard identification of the chemicals with estimated potential amount of matching chemicals emitted to municipal wastewater treatment plants. Seven areas were pointed out as high priority areas and two of these were identified as highest priority areas. These two areas are “the screen frame cleaning in screen printing” and “the cleaning of flexographic printing/packaging gravure printing machines after use of water dilutable inks”.