Green printing tip no. 40: How to green up your banners?

We are back today with a new tip on our weekly series of green printing tips, where we bring you information on green printing in collaboration with Greg Barber, an experienced eco-friendly printer.

Today Greg is talking about a way to green up banners, using no other than recycled plastic bottles!

How to green up your banners?

Tip #40

Today we have many more green options when it comes to making banners. For example, we have been printing biodegradable banners from bioflex, which will biodegrade in a landfill in 5 years.

We also have a natural, new environmental banner. Made from PET, which stands for polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic resin and a form of polyester. PET is the type of plastic labeled with the #1 code on or near the bottom of bottles and containers and is commonly used to package soft drinks, water, juice, peanut butter, salad dressings and oil, cosmetics and household cleaners.

In other words, these banners are made from recycled plastic bottles and containers.
This is a winner. We keep the plastic from going to the landfills and we make the recycled plastic into beautiful banners.

We have supplied the U.S Green Building Council, now called Urban Green Council, and CENYC, now called GrowNYC, and many other environmental groups with these durable and terrific printing banners, made from recycled plastic. Add the ceramic industry to our network of
believers. NCECA used our banners in Philadelphia at their annual show.

Here's an example of a PET banner we did for Ride Amigos, which arranges rides to events by grouping riders together. This way it saves fuel and money for these people. Also, many environmental riders have become friends and share their resources.

Most of the designers want to know how to create the files for these banners, so they won't look low res. My simple advice is this. Write the two dimensions down, such as 4' x 8' and then divide both dimensions in half. With the above size, you would come up with 2' x 4', when dividing both dimensions in half. Now save the files at 400 DPI, for the half size.

We will enlarge the banner 4 times to 4 x 8 foot, and the resulting DPI is 100 DPI, at the size we want. We can now print your banners with the quality you desire.

PET banners look like Vinyl banners, but are environmental and look and last as good as the non environmental, vinyl banners that we need to eliminate. And it gets even better - PET banners are cheaper than vinyl banners! Our price for PET banners is $8 per square foot. Last but not least - PET banners will biodegrade in a landfill.

For additional information on PET banners, please visit www.gregbarberco.com and www.ecofriendlyprinter.com. You can email Greg at greg@gregbarberco.com.

You can find links to all the tips we published so far on our green printing tips page, which is part of our green printing tools & resources.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: promoting green printing!