So there was relief last week when The New York Times-long one of the worst offenders-announced that it has switched to an ink that is 60 percent less likely to rub off. The two plants in the New York area, accounting for 80 percent of the paper’s circulation, have already started using the new inks. The Times’s national edition is printed at plants across the country; six of eight already use some version of “low rub” ink.
The nation’s publishers say that dirty hands are their No. 1 consumer problem. Changing ink, says William Adler of the Times, “is not going to be a small matter to the people who read the paper.” Ink manufacturers estimate that at least half of the country’s newspapers already use low rub inks, among them USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. “Readers were beginning to say ‘Clean up your act or we’ll go elsewhere’,” says Ruth Felland, manager for chemistry at the American Newspaper Publishers Association.
Low-rub inks represent a major technological advance for the industry. Newspaper ink has three components: pigment, oil and resins. The oil is the vehicle for the pigment and the resins keep the pigment uniformly suspended in the oil. After the ink is applied, it dries by being absorbed into the paper. (Time and cost prevent newspapers from heat-drying their pages as magazines do.) Standard inks are petroleum-based; “low rub” and “no rub” inks use more expensive oils and resins. (One of the best new sources is the ubiquitous soy bean.) What readers save in laundry they may pay for papers: the new inks cost at least 30 percent more.
