🌍 Earth Month tip: Let’s talk about Extended Gamut (ECG) printing. 🌍

This more planet-friendly ink option means using a seven-color process (CMYK + Orange, Green, Violet) instead of mixing thousands of spot inks. This can result in dramatically reduced chemical waste from spot ink mixing, reduced press wash-ups between jobs, less ink inventory sitting on shelves, lower VOC emissions from unused inks, and simplified waste disposal. This is because the seven-color process can reproduce approximately 90% of Pantone colors that previously required custom ink mixing.

Like many sustainable switches, this doesn’t just help the planet, it has operational benefits beyond sustainability as well. These include faster makeready and job changeovers, reduced ink inventory management, more predictable color reproduction, and better workflow automation opportunities.

ECG isn't new technology, but its environmental advantages are getting renewed attention as sustainability becomes a competitive requirement, not just a nice-to-have. The shops implementing extended gamut are discovering it's green through mathematics. Fewer inks, less waste, better consistency. Color management for ECG requires different approaches than traditional CMYK, but the environmental and operational payoffs make it an idea worth exploring.

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