The promotional market increasingly demands environmentally friendly products, while the general increase in production costs requires strategies to reduce waste. Two trends stemming from different motivations, but pointing to a common path: sustainability, undertaken with conviction by most of the companies that make machinery for customising clothing and gadgets. Therefore, increasingly popular are water-based and Oeko-Tex-certified inks, such as those of the Eco Inside line offered by the Colzip screen printing company, which places great emphasis on communications with the end customer through packaging and labels that are 100% recyclable or biodegradable. “Even in the digital sector,” according to Massimo Leva, owner of Aw Service, “the future is printing with certified eco-friendly inks, as demonstrated by Epson's choice to offer them by default, for example for the F2100 Dtg printer that we distribute”.

Moreover, in this case, the lower environmental impact can be combined with savings by using a special rip (the special Dev Studio software), which optimises consumption and increases image quality.

The same approach can be found at Offitek, which at PTE offered a series of DTG Digital Q Series machines whose production process is based on Oeko-Tex certified Kodak inks, glues and films; on the industrial printing front, Kornit's Atlas Max models with on-demand functionality to avoid overproduction, overstocking and waste, as well as single-pass waterless processes that reduce energy consumption, are very interesting. Also in the case of Invictus-branded line of compact Dtf printing presses presented by Embroidery Service, the focus is upstream on the sustainability of the equipment: in this case, on the reduction of consumption (2 Kw/h), thanks to the installation of ovens that work at a temperature below 100 °C, without detriment to the production of the final film. The sustainable approach has many facets and in some cases the environmentally friendly product - contrary to popular belief - also leads to lower production time and costs, as Fabrizio Selis of Market Screentypographic explains: “Take the use of water-based inks in screen printing, which many disdain because they tend to dry sooner than plastic inks. This is true if one jumps from one production run to the next, whereas if one organises oneself well and schedules one's orders in such a way as to start and finish batches, one has a twofold advantage: with water-based inks each processing step is shorter (3 to 5 seconds instead of 8 to 10 seconds) and in the end the result on the fabrics is also better.”