i Was Once Willing To Give My Life For What I Believed This Country Stood For Shirt

Curious about why we prefer screen printing to the alternative, newer, DTG (direct to garment) method? Check out our run through of the pros and cons of both techniques.EVERPRESS 50-50 2018 custom t-shirt production (147 of 337)THE FUTUREETHICAL INKSWhile the plastisol ink that helped screen printing take off in the ‘60s is still widely used, recent times have seen the emergence of vegan and sustainable inks, including revamped water-based inks.Plastisol inks have endured because they’re cheap and perform well in mass-production. However, as most plastisol inks contain PVC and/or phthalates, they can be toxic to the environment. Plus, any waste plastisol ink that gets produced must be broken down with harmful chemicals. So you can see why finding alternatives is important. Enter water-based inks. As their name suggests, these inks contain no damaging plastics. Though they have their cons – they still tend to come out less vivid than their plastic counterparts, are best used only with light-coloured garments, and can still be damaging in terms of the amount of energy required during their production – advances are being made every day.

i Was Once Willing To Give My Life For What I Believed This Country Stood For Shirt

Another key development that’s set to only get bigger over the next while, is vegan inks. (As an aside, despite the process often being called ‘silk screen printing,’ the screens used in screen printing are made of nylon and not silk, so no worms are harmed to make screen printed T-shirts.) When it comes to vegan inks, PETA has thus far only approved a small handful, but with all the developments currently being made on all kinds of vegan products, we’re eager to see what the future brings.Manual Printing Press at Everpress HQAUTOMATIONFirstly, automation hasn’t meant people are totally phased out of the screen printing process; someone still needs to feed garments into the machine, and quality control too. One of the biggest differences between a manual press operator and an automated one is speed. Where the capacity of a manual press is anything between 40 to 100 T-shirts per hour (depending on the abilities of the operator and the complexity of the design) the world record for an automated press is 2,139 T-shirts per hour. The average is lower of course, between 500 to 800 tees per hour, but you can see the kind of impact automation has had on T-shirt production.