UV or Not UV in ScreenPrinting Inks

In recent years probably no area of screenprinting has developed faster than UV printing. As a commercially viable technology its history is barely three decades old, but today it competes readily with the solvent-based screenprinting inks

Despite UV's somewhat troubled childhood, maturity has brought it wider acceptance, and in some areas of screenprinting it is even beginning to dominate. Today, virtually all CDs and DVDs are screenprinted using UV inks, and UV is seen as screenprinting's best hope in the ongoing battle with digital print technologies.
The principal reasons for this rapid growth are two-fold. For one thing, UV inks dry very rapidly. (We're talking three seconds or less!) For another, UV inks are about as environmentally friendly as you can get, because they produce almost no emissions. Unlike conventional inks, UV inks contain no solvents. The solvents in air-dry screenprinting inks evaporate as the inks dry releasing Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere. VOCs have been a prime target in the battle against air pollution because they are a key contributor to harmful pollutants like ground-level ozone. Some VOCs are classed as Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) and are subject to special regulatory controls under the Clean Air Act.
In many solvent-based inks, solvents make up more than 50% of the ink; in some, they make up more than 70%. That's a lot of solvent to evaporate away into the air. So, you can see that a large-scale print operation switching to a zero-emission print medium is going to make a big difference. For this reason alone UV inks are often seen as the wave of the future.