INGEDE News December 2018

Breakthroughs in self-adhesive labels and UV-curable inks, requirements for sustainable books

The regulation of packaging is in the headlines these days, mainly driven by the need to reduce plastic waste in the environment. The new packaging legislation might boost paper-based packaging – and there might even be some potential for the deinkers as white folding board is a source of desirable fibres for papermaking. A presentation at the INGEDE Symposium on February 13^th, 2019, will look into the changes in legislation and its possible effects; will it be a chance to promote paper as a sustainable product, backed by an active recycling industry?

Pressure sensitive adhesives are everywhere in the paper for recycling, especially on envelopes: There are address labels, self-adhesive stamps, and the self-sealing of the envelope itself. More and more prevalent are also advertising stickers to apply discount coupons on the goods of your choice. All these adhesives contribute to an increasing load of sticky deposits in the paper machines, especially on the screens, where they can lead to defects in the recycled paper – an ongoing, sticky issue for the deinkers. A positive development will be reported at the INGEDE Symposium: The story of a collaboration that converted the trouble maker into a product that does not create problems in the paper recycling process with new screenable adhesives.

The quality of recovered paper is changing by use of new printing and converting technologies, as well as marketing innovations which result in increased non-paper share. A presentation will look directly into the question, how different processes in graphical deinking lines can deal with all these challenges, for example products with UV-printing, UV-varnishing, lamination, fold-gluing, attached labels or inserts.

Here another breakthrough to be presented is the development of better deinkable UV curable inks, addressing another problem that increasingly troubles the deinkers: Dirt particles, small visible spots on the paper, that no customer wants to accept. Now the first technical solutions are available on the market, resulting from a joint project in order to improve the deinkability of UV prints. Currently, especially the overprint of printing processes with cross-linking inks like UV or HP Indigo, causes more and more production losses, and require more intense inspection of the raw material.

For HP Indigo prints, a colourful polyethylene lamination rather than a printing process, no better deinkable development is emerging for more than a decade. But here the extended producer responsibility that is more and more in demand also by the new EU Guidelines might help to increase awareness among printers and customers: In France, for the first time a coalition of the paper and the graphic industries calls “on printers to establish a separate collection of waste and scrap from HP Indigo”.  At the INGEDE Symposium, a presentation will sum up the present situation.

Celebrating 30 years of INGEDE, Bernhard Steinbeis, the founding chairman of INGEDE, will look back to the origins of the association. A keynote by Barbara Scheuer-Arlt, Vice President Production at Random House Publishing Group, will look into the challenges of modern book production: Does a tree have to die for every book, are e-books more sustainable? What about alternatives to the paper used today, what about recycled paper?

Find the schedule of these and more presentations of the INGEDE Symposium and how to register here on the INGEDE Website.