Dizzy Ink Recycling — Dizzy Ink Print Guide

A Risograph print guide designed & curated by Dizzy Ink.

Closing the Loop.

Risograph has a pretty good reputation for being an environmentally friendly print process, and there are plenty of reasons for that. It’s a cold printing process, we print on uncoated and recycled papers wherever possible, and Riso inks are made using rice bran oil. Lovely stuff! But there is one rather large plastic elephant in the room: the ink tubes.

Every colour we print comes in a chunky plastic cartridge, and once we’ve squeezed as much ink out of it as we possibly can, there’s always a little left behind. This leftover ink means the tubes aren’t particularly easy to deal with through conventional recycling channels. And when you print as much as we do, those tubes quickly start to pile up. We really don’t want all that plastic heading to landfill.

We’ve been finding weird and wonderful uses for them for years. Pencil pots, plant pots, lamps, even a chandelier! We love finding ways to give waste another life, but these were really ways of repurposing the tubes rather than recycling the material itself. So, a couple of years ago, we started working with a local plastic recycling studio to see what else we could do.

We began collecting empty tubes from our own studio, along with tubes donated by other Riso printers, taking them apart and chopping the plastic into smaller pieces. From there, the plastic can be heated and pressed into new forms. We can keep colours separate, mix different tubes together, turn them into sheets or press them into moulds. There’s quite a lot of experimenting, chopping, melting and seeing what happens!

And this is where one of the problems actually becomes one of our favourite bits. The leftover Riso ink that makes the cartridges difficult to recycle creates these amazing streaks and swirls of colour through the new material. Most of the original tube is translucent, so light shines through while little pockets of ink tint the plastic. Sometimes bits of lettering survive the process, sometimes an RFID chip sneaks in, and the colours mix differently every time. No two pieces are ever quite the same.

One of the first things we wanted to make was a bone folder. It just made sense. A plastic tube that once held the ink used to make prints can become a tool for folding paper, bookbinding and finishing those prints. The waste from one part of the making process goes straight back into another.

And we’re only really getting started. The more we experiment with the material, the more possibilities seem to pop up.

We’re not pretending Risograph printing creates no waste, because it does. For us, it’s about being aware of the materials we use, asking where they go when we’re finished with them, and seeing if we can keep them useful for a little longer.

So far, we’ve had riso tubes donated by: Charlotte Hepburn, Dizzy Ink, Duplikat, GAADA, Holodeck, Page Masters - we would like to invite all riso studios in the UK to join our our little attempt at closing the loop. The more tubes we collect, the more experimental products we can create, the less tubes end up in landfill.