For those with home offices or businesses that produce a lot of printed work, the benefits of switching to soy-based inks in addition to using recycled paper can be exponential. Choosing to use soy-based ink is not only a small step we can all take to help the environment, but actually results in higher print quality and longer lasting color than traditional printing ink. Being now available for home laser printers, it's worth switching to.

Although many people are not aware of it, traditional inks used for printing are actually petroleum based, made from mineral oil. Soy ink was an organic alternative created in the 1970s to replace petroleum-based ink in newspapers and it became successful substitute with over 94% of the newspapers in America today using it. However, it did not reach other mediums until the last few years. With the attention that "going green" has garnered businesses, some commercial printers started using it and it has caught on with soy-based toner cartridges being available for home printers.

The benefits of going soy are plenty and spread out in the different aspects of printing. In addition to moving away from fossil fuel use, soy ink results in less toxic chemicals being released in the air as it contains much lower levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as solvent additives that help traditional ink dry faster. Soy ink also spreads easier, resulting in less ink needed to print a job than traditional mineral-based inks. In terms of quality, soy ink results in color that is actually more vibrant than traditional ink and last much longer with a lower risk of smearing. In addition to its print qualities, soy-based ink is also easier to remove from paper in the recycling process, requiring less chemical bleaching to remove off the paper.

There are of course, some downsides. For commercial printers, soy ink takes longer to dry due to the lack of solvents to help it evaporate, hence it's widely used for porous newsprint that can soak in the ink and dry faster but is not used for magazine print where the gloss makes the drying time impractical. As a result, it is not as widely available an option as it should be but with about a quarter of the commercial printers in the US going green, it is easy to find a place to print business cards and stationary with soy ink and recycled paper.

For home use, soy-based toner cartridges are a relatively new product and as such, are more expensive than regular toner cartridges. As they gain in popularity, they will be readily available for more model types. There are also soy-ink based cartridges for ink-jet printers that are being developed and should be available in the next few years.

While switching to soy ink may not benefit the environment as much as some other green initiatives, it's a small step that can make a difference if enough people do it. With countless millions of cartridges used each year, the benefits of using less chemicals to manufacture ink and recycle used paper add up.  The best thing think about switching to soy is that quality is not just equal to, but actually better than the more harmful ink we're currently using.

There are many places online that have started carrying soy-based toners including:

LaserMonkGreen.com
Amazon.com
Buy.com

Unfortunately as soy ink has only recently been developed for toner cartridges, only select printer models are currently available.