Every drum of dirty press wash you pay to have hauled away is roughly 80–95% clean solvent. Solvent Recycling Systems supplies the equipment that keeps it in the building — solvent recyclers, parts and spray gun washers, anilox roll cleaning cabinets and corrosion control — to narrow web, wide web and corrugated printers across the United States.
We are a distributor, not a manufacturer with one machine to defend. If a batch recycler is wrong for your volume, we will say so. If your problem is the anilox and not the ink, we will say that too. Call 847.833.7010 or request a quote.
Where solvent and cleanup cost actually hides
Cleanup gets treated as one line on the waste invoice. It is really four separate problems, each with its own equipment answer, and they show up in this order on every run.
1. Makeready — plates, pans and chambers coming off the press
A job change means ink pans, doctor blade chambers, pumps, hoses and fittings all have to come off dirty and go back on clean. Hand-wiping parts in an open tub burns solvent, burns operator time, and leaves enough residue behind to contaminate the next color.
What we supply: solvent parts washers, spray gun and pump washers, and cleaners and degreasers.
2. On press — anilox cells filling in while the job runs
When operators start bumping ink to hit density, the instinct is to blame the ink. Usually the cells are partially plugged and the roll is no longer delivering its rated volume. Chemical soaking and manual scrubbing both take the roll out of service, and neither fully restores the engraving.
What we supply: anilox roll cleaning cabinets and tubs. Start with our guide to how dry-media anilox cleaning works if you are comparing methods.
3. Washup — dirty press wash leaving on a manifest
This is the one worth doing the arithmetic on. You buy clean solvent at a per-gallon price, use it once, then pay a second time to have a hauler take it away — and what leaves the building is still mostly solvent, carrying a small fraction of ink solids. A batch recycler distills the usable solvent back out on site, so the only thing you dispose of is the still bottoms.
What we supply: batch solvent recyclers, recycler bags and liners, and recyclable solvents.
4. Storage — clean parts sitting between runs
Anything that comes out of an aqueous or heated wash is chemically clean and completely unprotected. Bare steel press components, dies, spare chambers and fittings will flash rust in a humid plant faster than most people expect, and a rusted part is a part somebody has to clean twice.
What we supply: Cortec VpCI rust prevention and industrial MRO products.
Three questions that decide whether a recycler pays
We would rather you answer these honestly and buy nothing than buy a machine that sits in a corner. Have these ready and a fifteen-minute call will settle it.
How much do you actually use?
Gallons of press wash purchased per month, not per year, and not the number from a purchase order two years old. Low, steady volume changes which machine size makes sense, and sometimes means none does.
What is disposal really costing?
The hauler invoice, plus the drums, plus the labor to stage and manifest them. Most shops know the first number and have never added the other two.
What is in the solvent?
Water-based, solvent-based and UV inks behave differently in a still. Blends and unknown mixed waste streams are where recycling projects go wrong, so this is the question we ask first.
Clean and rusted is not clean
We distribute Cortec Corporation corrosion control alongside the cleaning equipment because the two problems arrive together. Vapor phase corrosion inhibitors work from the packaging — paper, film, emitters and liquids that protect the part inside a wrapped or enclosed space, without a coating anyone has to remove before the part goes back on press.
Printers use it on spare doctor blade chambers and ink pans in storage, machined press components between jobs, dies and tooling, and shipments of finished metal parts going out to customers. Browse rust prevention.
Tell us what your washup looks like
No configurator and no instant quote. You describe the operation, we tell you what fits and what does not, and you get a real number from a person. If the answer is that your volume does not justify a recycler yet, that is the answer you will get.
It helps to have your press type (narrow web, wide web or corrugated), your ink system (solvent, water-based or UV), roughly how many gallons of press wash you go through in a month, how you dispose of it now, and how many presses you are running.
Request a quote or call 847.833.7010. We are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and we ship nationwide.