Discharge ink disposal.

[Prosperi-Tees]

How do you dispose of leftover discharge ink? I was in a shop a couple years ago and watched them card off the excess discharge into the trash can because "It's water based". Is this proper? Oh and what a smell that stuff puts out after setting for a few days!

[brandon]

How do you dispose of leftover discharge ink? I was in a shop a couple years ago and watched them card off the excess discharge into the trash can because "It's water based". Is this proper? Oh and what a smell that stuff puts out after setting for a few days!

Oh hell no. Nothing down the drain. Same for standard water base inks as well. So here goes for our shop. Discharge left over ink gets poured into 5 gallon buckets. Any water based ink that is past its prime the same. Then the 5 gallon containers go to the transfer station / aka "dump" every month or so to the toxic section. I believe in WA state they destroy it by heat but I could be wrong. Either way that crap is killing the environment somehow. But the state takes full responsibilty for it once they take it. Just makes me feel horrible because we mix to the smallest amounts so there is no left over ink and people say plastisol is horrible but we recycle all of our plastisol ink. We turn any left over inks once a year or so into a cheap black or gray and offer it to large run clients as a recycled ink on the cheap. It works and saves a lot of crap being wasted. Since we have used QCM for plastisol since day one I feel even better as they were way ahead of the curve. Pretty much everyone now has the same voc, phthalates, metals, everything clean ink. Which is good! Alright, I am rambling. I can talk about what we mix our water base / discharge in to save plastics as well but that was another post.

[RICK STEFANICK]

BRANDON, If nothing goes down the drain . How are you washing your squeegies after running a waterbase job? and reclaiming both plastisol screens and waterbase screens?

[mk162]

Also, most waste water is filtered for solids and those solids are incinerated.  The stuff that makes it through is subjected to a heck of a lot of bleach and UV.  I would like to see studies done in it, but I bet that it's a lot better for ink to go down the drain than into a landfill.

[sweetts]

Isn't emulsion remover pretty much bleach anyway? Or am I mixing things up?

Sent  from samsung gem(the worst smart phone ever)

[Zelko-4-EVA]

Emulsion remover is a chemical called "Periodic acid"

from my understanding - anything that is thrown into the trash cannot have any "free flowing liquids"

so - dry out your waterbased ink  and then it can be thrown away.

solids in the wastewater still isnt a good idea.  the best way to get rid of your wastes is to cure it on a scrap shirt or something and then throw it away. 

[Fluid]

Discharge like any inks should be cured before disposal. 

[brandon]

I should have said we try to have nothing go down the drain but yes it does happen when cleaning squeegees and reclaiming screens. Sorry, been a looong week. But anyway, not worried about our plastisols since we recycle all those into black/gray. But for water base / discharge we were informed by Matsui themselves on how to properly dispose of leftover inks. I am talking about bulk ink, say a half gallon which we all know can go a long way depending on image size. So say at last minute client changes pantone number and you have said half gallon of discharge ink laying around. Which, by the way is why we do not add the activator until they are absolutely sure now! So the shirt order is couple thousand prints and you have all that ink laying around. According to Matsui it does not go down the drain, and if there is too much ink to cure you take it to the transfer station/dump where yes they do incinerate it. Same for old water base inks past their shelf life. I do understand it would be better to cure the ink and then take it to the dump but how does one go about curing gallons at a time when the situation arises? And according to Matsui the ink drying in the containers is not a proper cure so even though it may look and feel cured it is not safe at all. I am excited the CCI rep will be here soon so I can discuss further with him. And if any ink tech or chemist  or Matsui themselves can chime in here that would be great. If we are doing something the wrong way we will absolutely change our disposal methods today. Alright, back to work for me

[LuxInks]

This is a great question. As with everyone else, we mix to the tee as much as possible. With leftovers, we put it all on a towel that we have and send it through the dryer. We use this towel over & over again. It's nasty, crusty, and doesn't resemble a towel at all!. We also wipe out all of the inks out of the screen with a shirt and send it down the dryer as well.
I agree that it should be cured prior to disposal.
Have a good one.
Paul

[Prosperi-Tees]

I like the towel idea, seems pretty easy and nothing gets in the water or landfill until you throw away your nasty crusty towel.

[brandon]

Super happy! I was talking about recycling our left over plastisols into gray / black above and we have an order for 4000 t's on Monday with gray. That is going to eat about 1/4 of our recycled ink so money saved and no ink wasted. Awesome!

[ZooCity]

Brandon brings up an excellent point about plastisols. They may be pvc based but there is minimal waste compared to anything else.  We do the same and print all of our private label transfers with recycled ink- one dark bucket, one light bucket.  The grey that the pigments all mixed together create is beautiful, rich, almost shimmery. 

How nasty pvc is, that's really dependent on the recipe of plasticizers used in it.  Nobody should be freaking out about the minute amount of pvc going on your T as a base ingredient, there is more pvs in you bathroom plumbing than all the shirts you'll ever wear. 

As Brandon mentioned, QCM did an excellent job of acting responsibly on this long before the threat of regulation convinced the other mfg's to be 'green'.  No other ink mfg's gave two *$cks about it until the cpsia and the latest wave of greenwashing came around.  This irresponsible behavior in manufacturing our inks led the public into the perception that wb were more environmentally friendly I believe, well that and the fact they have the word water in them which people seem to automatically equate with being safe for some reason.  It's our fault as an industry for not demanding safer inks as well and it's our consumers fault for not demanding it from us.  I don't want to reef on the mfg's alone as I've seen big, big shops post on forums about how 'green' they were by pumping out 1000s of gallons of petroleum distillates a year, this is a bad attitude of the industry overall it seems.  But what a crime, you have the ability all along to make a safer product that performs just as well and you don't bother. 

As we use more and more wb I plan to do the same as with plastisol by setting an expiry date and mixing down before that date into a standard dark grey and sell it based on the fact its a recycled ink to ensure it gets used enough. 

Discharge...that's another story.  The towel method sounds pretty optimal actually.  I would imagine the goal is to cure every last bit of it that you can on-site which makes it into normal waste.   It's too bad that you can't use 'dead' discharge as regular wb. 

[brandon]

So just got back from Home Depot and they have paint hardener. I bag per gallon. Turns paint and inks (plastisol, water base, discharge) into solids safe for the dumpster. This is awesome! While we reuse all of our plastisol thats left over discharge is a pain in the rear. We are mixing some now into a waste discharge bucket so we shall see on Monday how well it worked. Anyone else on here try this yet?

[Prosperi-Tees]

I tried it but to be honest cat litter or sawdust will work as well. When I worked for a paint company we had barrels of sawdust to get rid of old paint, after it dried out toss it in the dumpster. I guess we could do the same with discharge the only thing that concerned me was paint is an air dry coating where as discharge ink is a heat cure product. Im not sure if you just absorb the water would the remaining solids be harmful? idk im rambling.

[brandon]

I tried it but to be honest cat litter or sawdust will work as well. When I worked for a paint company we had barrels of sawdust to get rid of old paint, after it dried out toss it in the dumpster. I guess we could do the same with discharge the only thing that concerned me was paint is an air dry coating where as discharge ink is a heat cure product. Im not sure if you just absorb the water would the remaining solids be harmful? idk im rambling.

Very good point. And something I am going to address with all three ink reps I am talking to about this. I do believe the chemical we are introducing into the discharge mix does complete a solid mix reaction unlike cat litter or sawdust but I could be completely wrong. That is why I am trying to get 100% accurate answers here and anywhere really.