Where does the waste in prepress industry goes?

Answer 1

Well, it's been almost ten years since I've been associated with prepress (in a different line of work now) but I can say that over the years, disposal of waste products has probably become less and less of a problem. The prepress industry has changed dramatically over the last 20 years - even the last 10 years probably. I say that it's become less of a problem because compared to years past, there are less "waste products" involved in prepress, as more and more of it is done electronically and digitally, and goes direct-to-press, with with litho presses that have DP capability, or directly to digital printing presses. Back when I first started in the traditional prepress industry back in the 1980's, you had film that was recycled for it's silver content, and also the spent photographic chemicals from the darkroom that also had some silver in it. Recyclers would actually pay you to take it all off their hands and they would make their money getting the silver out of it. Another area was in plating - the spent chemistry from the plateroom had to be sent out to special recyclers who would dispose of it since the chemistry was toxic. Nowdays prepress deals with digital files received from clients/customers, and most, if not all, proofing and printing is done digitally. When I ended my prepress career about ten years ago, we were at the point where all of our prep work, including proofing and plating/imposition was done digitally with PDF files. The only step that involved chemical waste was the plating process. The plate was made digitally on a Creo imagesetter DTP/RIP but at that point it still had to be developed and gummed for press. Printers at that time were just on the cusp of eliminating even that, and just going direct to press or to digital printing itself. So the "short answer" to this question is these days prepress waste is not really much of an issue anymore. The whole process nowdays involves very little physical material to create waste byproducts.