Tony Moore, md of T-Shirt Printers (TSP), the Leeds-based trade only promotional garment decorator, also believes that investment to bring down production costs is the only way to make ‘green’ products truly viable.

To reduce its carbon footprint, the company has installed five high speed, high capacity curing ovens to reduce gas consumption by half. Each dryer will also be fitted with a hot air extrator.

A Carbon Trust loan funded the carbon reduction project, which required strict energy savings criteria to be met, said Moore.

Moore believes the development of green production and products will be one of the few sectors to grow in the next few years, but predicts siginificant reductions in production costs will be needed to make even a 10% volume increase in ‘green’ products possible. “Without significant investment it just won’t happen,” he said. “The textile screen printing industry has got to get used to investing in this type of technology and we need to sell it to our customers as one of the advantages of producing in the UK,” he said. “The ecological advantages gained by the use of water-based inks on organic T-shirts can be totally dissipated by the use of low efficiency dryers and slow production speeds.”

Of his own company’s investment he added: “This is a strategic investment in energy consumption reduction and providing better working conditions for our staff. This quality of dryer, usiually only seen in bio-medical and specialist paper printing applications, is accurate to less than one degree centigrade.” A further MHM S Class high speed Tshirt printing machine and a second automatic folding/bagging machine were also installed at the same time as the dryers. A total of 11 peces of plant were moved in or out of the 24,000sq ft building and three other presses were repositioned to accomodate the 7-metre long dryers.

“The whole operation was completed without losing any required production capacity and TSP was able to offer its usual five-day turn round throughout the period,” added commercial director Joe Moore.

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend

Bookmark this

---