Gravure Green Printing Standard Focuses on Environmental Pollution

[ppzhan summary] After the development of recent years, green printing accounts for an increasingly large proportion of China's printing industry. As the saying goes, nothing can be accomplished without norms or standards. In order to regulate the development of the green printing industry, the formulation of relevant printing standards has been put on the agenda. It is reported that the green printing standard for gravure printing has now entered the stage of soliciting public comments.

The green printing standards are initially divided into three major parts, namely gravure printing, lithographic printing and bill printing. Later, further expansion of the scope of categories will be considered based on the implementation and promotion results of these three standards. Among them, the green printing standards related to lithographic printing and bill printing have already been issued and have received a positive response from printing enterprises, and the green printing standard for gravure printing has now been submitted to the Ministry of Environmental Protection and has entered the stage of soliciting public comments. Here, the key contents of the green printing standard for gravure printing are introduced.

The standard applies to gravure-printed products of paper, plastic and their composite materials and to their printing production processes, and mainly covers the following:

(1) Control indicators and requirements are formulated around the environmental characteristics of gravure product production (printing);

(2) The pollution emissions of gravure printing enterprises shall comply with the pollutant discharge standards and requirements stipulated by the state or local authorities;

(3) Environmental issues in gravure prepress;

(4) Organic solvents in gravure printing and post-press;

(5) Resource conservation in gravure printing;

(6) Active adoption of advanced technologies and production processes that promote resource conservation and comprehensive utilization and prevent pollution and reduce emissions;

(7) The printing process adopts organic solvent drying and recovery devices, or should be equipped with solvent drying emission treatment devices;

(8) The use of water-based inks is advocated;

(9) Coextrusion and solvent-free lamination processes are used to reduce the generation of VOC;

(10) The recovery of organic solvents and materials containing organic solvents is strengthened and institutionalized.

The green printing standard for gravure printing highlights the requirements for reducing VOC emissions, and the requirements involving the reduction of VOC emissions account for 24 points in the scoring criteria. At the same time, it clearly states that independent solvent recovery devices must be installed at key workstations where solvent volatilization occurs, and then the solvents are reused in different ways at a later stage, such as heat energy recovery from solvents and the reuse of solvents.

With regard to VOC emissions, various regions have successively introduced relevant emission standards. For example, in November 2010, Guangdong Province issued the "Emission Standard of Volatile Organic Compounds for the Packaging and Printing Industry of Guangdong Province"; in September 2013, the "Breakdown of Key Tasks of the 2013-2017 Clean Air Action Plan of Beijing" issued by Beijing stipulated that the emission standard of atmospheric pollutants for the packaging and printing industry would be formulated in 2014, and a VOC limit standard for products would be formulated at the same time.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-361815.html