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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, August 3, 2003

AFTER DEADLINE

Paper does its best to aid environment

By Anne Harpham

This column usually deals with issues related to our coverage and the decisions we make in the newsroom in the process of reporting and writing the news of the day.

But there are many other critical components in the business of getting a newspaper to your front door or newsstand.

A significant number of the nonnews questions we get deal with the ink and paper used by The Advertiser.

In a year, we will use 23,000 metric tons of paper, a type known in the business as newsprint. Each roll of newsprint we run through the presses weighs about 1,650 pounds. It takes 36 rolls to put out the average daily Advertiser. For a Sunday paper, it's 192 rolls.

Newsprint is the newspaper's second-largest expense, after employee wages.

Readers often wonder how much newsprint is recycled, and whether we are doing our part for the environment.

We get all of our newsprint from Norpac, a Weyerhauser Co. mill in Longview, Wash. The Norpac mill is a paper-recycling facility as well as a paper mill.

According to Bill Bogert, The Advertiser's vice president for production, all newsprint from this mill contains recycled fiber.

The newsprint we receive is 25 percent recycled paper and 75 percent "virgin" fiber. Bogert said it is difficult to obtain paper with a larger percentage of recycled fiber in it because of the scarcity of high-quality recyclable paper.

Now about the ink.

The Advertiser uses what are known as letterpresses, meaning the images on the paper come from an inked plate with raised lettering. The letterpress ink is called Arrowhead Low Rub Black. It is manufactured by Flint Ink, one of the two major newspaper ink suppliers in the United States, and is a petroleum oil-based, low-rub black ink.

According to Bogert, it is an improved ink formula over the older standard black inks of a few years ago.

Still, Bogert said, it is not rub- proof.

We do have a small offset press, which uses a slightly different process than the letterpress to print pages. It is used to print some of the paper, such as the TGIF section and some advertising inserts and sections.

On the offset press, we use a Flint ink called Arrowlith Low Rub Soy. This ink has a soybean-oil base and is considered kinder to the environment and more biodegradable. The offset soy ink is one-third more expensive than the letterpress petroleum-based ink.

However, our color inks are soy-based for both the letterpress and offset presses.

All of our waste inks are recycled and reclaimed through a recycling system at our plant.

Next year, some of this equation will change when The Advertiser switches over to printing at our new $82 million facility in Kapolei.

That plant will include two state-of-the-art offset presses that will allow us to print up to 70,000 copies an hour on each press. We will be able to print a 64-page paper with color on every page. We are limited in the amount of color we can use with our present presses, which are about 40 years old and were installed at a time when color pages in newspapers were about as rare as color TVs were.

Bogert anticipates that paper and ink usage will increase when the new presses come online. The ability to print many more four-color pages will increase ink usage, and Bogert said he expects more commercial printing work and more pages in the newspaper, thus increasing newsprint usage as well.

Bogert also promises that the new press will mean a significant reduction in ink ruboff. And we will switch to a soy-based black ink.