Genesta Inks achieve ECO PASSPORT Certification

Milan, 19 June 2017 - Epson, a pioneer in digital textile printing technology, and its owned companies FOR.TEX and F.lli Robustelli, announced today that its full range of Genesta inks - acid, reactive, disperse, pigment and sublimation-disperse – have achieved ECO PASSPORT certification from OEKO-TEX®. The water-based inks developed by Epson in collaboration with FOR.TEX allow reliable, precise and colourfast 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.

Printing companies using certificated inks such as Genesta Inks can be confident that they will meet the chemical requirements of STANDARD100 by OEKO-TEX® .

“We are very proud to have received the ECO PASSPORT certification for all our Genesta, our top textile inks,” says Tomoaki Kuwata, General Manager, of Epson’s P Strategic Planning Department. “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”[1].

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 fibers. With acid, reactive, disperse, pigment and sublimation-disperse inks, the Genesta range covers a wide and perfectly balanced color space. Genesta inks are packed in one or three-litre thermo-sealed multilayer aluminum 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 makes it possible to reduce the cleaning cycles of the printheads, and ink consumption is also dramatically reduced. Each cartridge has an identification chip to prevent accidental loading of the wrong ink.