Gravure printing has been particularly developed in the food packaging. Action to reduce the effects on the environment is also requested in the field, remarking the ink in soft packaging. The industry of gravure printing emits ca. 60% of volatile organic compounds (VOC) from total printing industry. The recycle system of organic solvents has been developed to solve the problem. The ink well adapted for the recycle system was developed. It uses only two solvents, which has advantage to re-use the solvents to prepare gravure ink. Aqueous ink is another way to reduce VOC. Quality and costs of aqueous inks have been improved for actual use. Their life cycle assessments (LCA) were evaluated. We examined the results and challenge to build the next generation environmental friendly gravure printing system.

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The printing ink is used for many printed matters. It has been our subject that global environmental problems, such as the atmospheric and water pollution, are suffered from some contamination in printing process, and the human body of carcinogenesis and crotch lining house syndrome from the harmful materials in the printed matter and the ink. In this situation, laws and regulations in the printing were adjusted and also various symbol marks for environmentally friendly printed matter and ink in the environment were established. Furthermore, enterprises that relate to the printing and printing inks utilize positively the self-restrictions made by themselves and appeal the keyword "Environment" to the society. As a result, we, ink manufacturers switched the conventional type of inks to new type of inks such as aroma free mineral oil based inks, soy bean based inks partially including mineral oil, and non-VOC 100% soy bean based inks. Presently, the waterless offset inks without fountain solution in printing and the quick-drying UV ink with non-VOC raw materials are introduced to the market. Hereafter, the printing industry as the infrastructure of the information industry, is expected that positively it keeps contributing to global environmental preservation largely.

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In printing processes, the treatment of reagents for environmental protection, which are consumed in printing machines and the peripherals, has not improved well. However, the environment responsiveness has been requested as a standard to choice them in these years, and the environmental-friendly reagents have been released. They have efficiency, workability and cost as well or better than conventional reagents do. Now we can discuss efforts to prepare their standards for environmental protection. The progress of green action in printing processes were introduced in this field, such as the measures against volatile organic compounds (VOC) from dampening water and wash oil, the splash of antiblocking powder, and the management of chemicals like cleaner and so on.

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Though the Computer to Plate (CTP) technology cut many processes in printing, furthermore, "Process-less" CTP plate is requested to get the highest authentication of environmental conservation printing. Over 95% of the CO₂ emission from the plate making process is due to the developer and the treatment. Now we have the second-generation plate materials, and there are some mechanisms to work "Process-less" CTP plate, such as ablation, addition or polarity change. The ideas of design and problems of "Process-less" CTP plate which are classified into "On-Machine Developing" were discussed in this review. They became adjusted to the thermal setters and printing machines in existence. It gives an expectation that the technology is widely used in the printing industry.

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Recycled paper products, especially contain de-inked pulp fibers in highly percent, are well known as "environmentally friendly products" and popularly used in the domestic market. However, used paper products cannot to be all recycled from consumers. In addition, recycled pulps does not represent their original quality performance due to they get damage in the recycling process. Due to the above situations, there are limitations to use recycled pulp fibers with highly percent in paper products. In the last few years, ideas that mixing recycled pulp and environmental friendly fresh pulp have become the main current in the domestic pulp and paper industry, instead of using highly percent of recycled pulp in each grade of paper products. In this report, we introduce characteristics and strong points of resources of typical environmental friendly pulp, such as plantation wood, certified wood and thinned wood and new types of environmentally friendly printing and writing paper products made of these resources.

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The inorganic electroluminescent (EL) panel used in this study is a distributed-type EL panel, which can be produced using a printing technique. It differs from thin-film-type EL panels which have been used for displays in previous published studies. Although distributed-type inorganic-EL panels are partially marketed for use as back panels, their luminosity are low compared with other luminescent panels. Thus if their luminosity can be increased, they can be used in new applications. In this study, an EL panel produced by a screen-printing method had a luminosity of 1200 cd⁄m² at a frequency of 1 kHz. Moreover, when frequency was increased to 4 kHz, a luminosity of 2500 cd⁄m² was achieved. A further advantage of this EL panel is that both sides of the panel emit light. Furthermore, when the electric characteristics of this EL panel were investigated, it was found that a remarkable increase in the luminosity could be achieved by employing a low capacitive reactance.

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Nanoimprint lithography is one of the promising nano-fabrication technologies for nano devices such as semiconductors, optics, bio-medicals, storage media and so on, because of the advantages of nano-scale resolution, pattern printability and low cost method. We developed quartz mold fabrication process for UV nanoimprint lithography applied by the most advanced photomask fabrication techniques. In this paper, we investigated the correlation between positive ion species in a radio-frequency CFX⁄O₂ plasma for quartz dry etching and etched quartz pattern profiles. The results shows that CF⁺, CF₂⁺ ions decrease and O⁺, F⁺, CO₂⁺ ions increase with increasing O₂ gas flow. In addition, etched quartz pattern becomes taper profile because Cr hard mask layer is etched easily in case of high O₂ gas flow, on the other hand some etching residue consist of fluorocarbon deposition occurs on the bottom of etched quartz pattern in case of low O₂ gas flow. That indicates that etched quartz profile can be controlled by optimizing CFX⁄O₂ plasma conditions (depo-rich⁄etch-rich) in quartz dry etching process. Especially O₂ gas flow is one of key parameters to optimize CFX⁄O₂ plasma conditions. Furthermore demonstrations of the pattern transfer were carried out by using our pillar array quartz mold. The result shows that fine patterns were successfully transferred to a photocurable polymer (PAK-01, Toyo Gosei Co., Ltd.) layer on Si substrate by UV nanoimprint instrument (Waseda Univ.).It shows that the geometry correspondence between our quartz mold pattern and the printed polymer pattern are exceedingly good.

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Optical cross section images were directly obtained by confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) using a fluorescence stain technique. Image processing was performed on these optical cross section images. Eventually, the depth of ink vehicle penetration could be evaluated. Difference of vehicle penetration into uncoated papers with different degree of smoothness is discussed. The amount of oil based ink transfer increased with the increase of paper smoothness. As a result, the ink vehicle also penetrated deeper into paper.

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