Epson's Genesta inks get ECO PASSPORT certificate

20 Jun '17

3 min read

Epson, a pioneer in inkjet printers and digital textile printing systems & technology, and its owned, Italian digital printing companies FOR.TEX and F.lli Robustelli, have announced that Epson’s full range of Genesta inks - acid, reactive, disperse, pigment and sublimation-disperse – have achieved the ECO PASSPORT certification from OEKO-TEX.

The water-based inks developed by Epson in collaboration with FOR.TEX, allow reliable, precise, and colour-fast printing of the highest quality onto any fabric type.

To achieve ECO PASSPORT certification, Genesta inks had to pass two verification stages set by OEKO-TEX. The first stage involved the screening of chemicals at the ingredient level against the OEKO-TEX Restricted Substance list and the second stage against the Manufacturing Restricted Substance list; where analytical verification ensures that certified products can be used in the sustainable production of human-ecologically friendly textiles.

ECO PASSPORT is a mechanism by which textile chemical suppliers demonstrate that their products can be used in sustainable textile production. It authenticates the safety of chemicals used during the production of textile dyes, pigments, inks, and finishing agents. OEKO-TEX is the first system proving the safety of textiles in Europe, and Nissenken is the exclusive certification authority in Japan. Certifications cover each stage of raw materials, product, and company environment. The STANDARD 100 by OEKO-TEX product certification has a history of over 20 years, boasting over 160,000 issued certificates for millions of labelled textile products, and over 10.000 participating companies along the textile chain. The ECO PASSPORT is the more recent and updated protocol to certificate sustainable textile production.

Genesta inks meet the highest quality standards of production reliability and printing fastness for all fibres. With acid, reactive, disperse, pigment, and sublimation-disperse inks, Genesta range covers a wide and perfectly balanced colour space. Genesta inks are packed in 1 or 3 litre thermo-sealed multilayer aluminium cartridges that are completely exhaustible and this is a guarantee of absolute reliability and minimal waste. Packaging is produced with the utmost care and the ink is totally degassed for a perfect printing performance.

The high reliability of the Genesta inks, manufactured by Epson, allows to reduce the cleaning cycles of the print-heads and the ink consumption is dramatically reduced. Each cartridge has an identification chip to prevent incidental loading of the wrong ink.

Tomoaki Kuwata, general manager, of Epson’s P strategic planning department said, “We are very proud to have received the ECO PASSPORT certification for all our Genesta, our top textile inks. It assures all Monna Lisa users around the world that Epson complies with the necessary environmental legislations and is the next step to promoting a new, sustainable, printing methodology after the previous ECO PASSPORT achieved by the UltraChrome inks.” (GK)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India

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