IPA, commonly used as a fount additive, has a number of names, isopropyl alcohol and isopropanol perhaps being the most common.

Alcohol damping was only introduced about 20 or 30 years ago but now many printers are moving away from it; some of the reasons are outlined below.

Why stop using alcohol?

IPA is a Volatile Organic Compound, or VOC - it is carbon-based and evaporates very readily. This evaporation gives rise to what are referred as VOC emissions.

Breathing in IPA as it evaporates in the press room, or getting it on your skin as you work, is harmful to health, causing headaches and concentration problems, skin irritation and more serious, long term problems. Getting rid of it makes a much healthier working environment for your staff. Even reducing it by a few percent can make a substantial difference, not just to the atmosphere but also to consumption and therefore costs.

It’s also a fire hazard, being extremely flammable.

VOC emissions cause a number of wider environmental problems in addition to health problems within the workplace. They combine with nitrogen oxides in the air to form low level ozone, which is a respiratory irritant, contributing to asthma and similar health problems. They also contribute to climate change, and some are very potent greenhouse gases (methane is one of these, and is generated in landfill as the content rots down).

If you can reduce your VOC emissions, you are making a very valuable improvement to your environmental performance. Controlling emissions by using good housekeeping measures helps, reducing the amount of alcohol used helps even more – and stopping using it helps most of all.

Making IPA uses non-renewable resources – generally petroleum or natural gas deposits. Such resources need conserving as much as possible.

Lastly, there may well be financial incentives. New markets can be opened up to customers concerned about VOC emissions, insurance companies may look more favourably on a printer whose fire risk is reduced (this, of course, depends a great deal on what else you are doing on your site), and there is the cost of IPA itself.