Secondly, and no less importantly for some, they will be mentally adding ‘responsible waste management’ to the list of green credentials they either promote to customers or use to achieve an official green accreditation.

This will be all well and good for certain materials, such as paper and board. But for others, the printer may feel they’ve been slightly misled when it comes to the practicalities of actually getting materials such as waste cartridges, polythene, PVC mesh and ink tins out of their door and back into the supply chain. ‘Technically recyclable’ and ‘commercially recyclable’ they will soon realise, can mean two very different things, and a bit of planning and research may be needed before they can start to reap the financial and environmental rewards.

The reason recycling may turn out to be slightly more of a labour of love than first anticipated is all down to how most UK print shops are supplied with substrates and consumables. In countries where the materials are manufactured, the printer can return their waste to be reused. UK companies, by contrast, are in the main reliant on waste-management companies being able to turn a profit through selling core materials on.

"The problem with wide-format substrates, particularly, is that people tell printers that what they’re buying is eco-friendly and recyclable and has a value, but there’s no UK business that could supply it and then take it back as there is in Europe," explains Richard Spreadbury, customer care manager at J&G Environmental.

Hefty cost of landfill
This lays the economies of recycling a lot more open to fluctuation and instability. The first challenge facing those eager to save themselves the hefty charge of sending offcuts and used consumables to landfill, then, will be actually finding someone willing to sign up to regular recycling of more niche materials.

"It’s a huge headache to try and find someone," says Matt Tibbitts, production manager at wide-format printer Macro Print. "One of our largest moving materials is PVC mesh. Because it’s hard to break down and recycle, we’ve been through half a dozen different recycling plants. They’d take some samples and go and see if they could find a market for it, and make sure it could go through the machine, but when they started taking it in large amounts they realised it was costing them too much."

Unlike easy-to-break-down (and therefore valuable) materials, such as paper, getting a decent price for wide-format materials and some consumables such as ink cartridges can also be a constant battle, adds Tibbitts. Earning lots on this kind of waste is never going to be realistic, he reports. Instead it’s a question of keeping costs down.

It’s no surprise, then, that many printers will quickly decide that trying to recycle the more challenging substrates is not worth their while.

The fact they must cling to, however, says Spreadbury, is that recycling these materials will probably still prove no more costly than sending them to landfill, once the figures are scrutinised. And as landfill tax – now £85-£100 per tonne – continues to rise, recycling may soon become a less costly option that printers can ill afford to ignore.

"We ask a lot of smaller wide-format printers: ‘would you rather pay to landfill the product or to recycle it?’" says Spreadbury. "Most materials can be recycled at the same cost as landfill, but the printer has got to be prepared to do a bit of work."

The first bit of work to do is to decide whether to go to a different company with each material, or one company that will come and collect all recyclable waste in one go. This can take a fair bit of research, ringing around and comparing costs.

In an ideal world, says Jonathan Neville, managing director at polythene printer Polyprint, firms would send their waste to lots of different companies. "I would say go to lots of different specialists, because chances are the person who will take it all won’t process it themselves," he says. "Scrap metal companies process scrap metal, but they don’t tend to process polythene and vice versa, so you might end up paying a middle man."

But this not being an ideal world, this advice will for printers in the know bring two ominous words to the mind: segregation and storage. The actual process of separating different materials into different places to avoid contamination is not that onerous, explains owner of WasteCare recycling Peter Hunt. But storing up enough of one material to make it worth the recycler’s while to come out and collect it might be.

"Below 300kg of waste, and the cost of actually getting there to do the collection is usually going to go up disproportionately," explains Hunt. "So if someone’s got 50kg and the cost of getting there and doing it is £40, there aren’t many streams that would be lucrative enough to cover that cost."

"We worked out if we were going to go down the segregation route, we’d need six or seven different storage areas and they would have to be large enough to store enough to fill our collector’s lorry," says Tibbitts. "It takes us between a month and month and a half as it is to store enough up for our collectors to come out, but if we were producing separate bales we’d have material lying around even longer."

While agreeing that for some printers, storage issues will stand in the way of segregated collection, there are many who would point out that there are ways for others to tackle this issue, again with a bit of work.

Ray Higginson runs an ink cartridge cutting service, and says this can reduce the space taken up by cartridges prior to collection by 75%. "We take the volume out by slicing it lengthways," he says. "We then try and give them different storage solutions as well so, instead of having a load of containers that are just stacked across the car park, we give them containers that can be stacked on top of each other, to use the available space more effectively."

"Getting more into one area also helps the printer get a better deal when it comes to their waste company picking them up," he adds.

Neville adds that instead of assuming that waste storage areas have to be inside, printers might be surprised to realise they can in fact utilise yard areas. "We shrinkwrap the pallets of polythene we’re storing so they are basically waterproof, but a bit of water doesn’t really matter," he says.

And if the printer really doesn’t have the storage space, a savvy strategy could be to buddy up with other printers in area, he adds. "My tip would be look for someone in your area who is in much the same trade as you and join up with them," he says, explaining that this way the printer won’t have to store anywhere near as much of one material before there will be enough in the area for the recycling company to deem a journey worthwhile.

Those who just don’t have the space may well, however, have to go for an all-in-one style collection, where a waste management company is happy to come out reasonably regularly because they are filling their truck through the combined volume of lots of different materials.

No easy answer
Testament to the fact that there really is no one-size-fits-all solution to how to most cost effectively recycle ‘difficult’ materials, is the fact that this could actually work out cheaper even for those who have the storage space. A specialist company is less likely, after all, to be based locally, so though willing to pay handsomely for the material, may charge more for transportation.

"If you can find someone within 20 or 30 miles, you’ll probably get a better deal than going further," says Spreadbury. "But whether you negotiate a free-of-charge collection, whether it’s cheaper to segregate or go local, that’s all got to be done on a site-by-site basis."

There is unfortunately, then, no simple answer to the conundrum of how to cheaply and responsibly dispose of the range of wastes a printer generates. But printers keen to save on landfill charges and to help the environment, shouldn’t be put off at the first hurdle, despite how daunting and time consuming the idea of balancing lots of different market-force, storage and transport factors can seem.

While the commercial case for recycling more ‘difficult’ materials can seem impossibly uncertain, printers should brace themselves for the challenge. What is certain after all, is that there will, after a bit of research and bargaining, be someone out there willing to take that PVC offcut or old ink drum. And it’s quite likely they will in the end charge less for the pleasure than the local tip.