How material and packaging development trends affect the flexible packaging industry

Today, the global

users and processing plants are continually merging and changing at an astonishing pace. Take Wal Mart, the largest food retailer in North America, as an example: last year it acquired the supermarket giant ASDA, expanding into the European market in one stroke and bringing a huge impact on related flexible packaging suppliers. In addition, Huntsman Corporation of the United States, one of the world's largest packaging companies (with sales of USD 1.5 billion), also announced in May this year that it had been acquired by a Citigroup investment fund for USD 1.1 billion. Early this year, Alcan merged with Alusuisse, which owned Lawson Mardon Packaging; one third of the shares of Dixie Toga/ltap, a flexible packaging supplier with sales of USD 250 million, was also held by Bemis C, and the name of the new company is ltap/Bemis.

Judging from the general trend, financially strong large flexible packaging manufacturers are becoming exclusive regional suppliers by gradually acquiring medium-sized enterprises. It is hard to say who will be next.

Below, let us look at how environmental regulations and the trends in materials and packaging continue to affect the flexible packaging industry.

1. Regulations on waste packaging

In some countries, the regulatory tax or penalty levied on waste packaging is being reduced. In the UK, for example, it has fallen from 11% to 9%. Food manufacturers are investing most of their funds in packaging lines in order to use thinner films and thereby avoid over-packaging. From an environmental point of view, the general trend is a shift from rigid packaging to flexible packaging. Compared with flexible packaging manufacturers, investment by rigid packaging producers is declining.

Nevertheless, some changes in market development philosophy can occasionally be seen in other areas too. For example, Mc Vities biscuits and Jaffa cakes in the UK have adopted a composite can packaging.

1. Trends in materials

Materials are trending toward thinner, stronger films. Many snack foods use 15 µm/15 µm adhesive laminated film. Polymer engineering technology has also improved, including metallization technology, and further development in this area can be expected. With strong growth in investment in metallizing plants, the price of standard metallized film will continue to fall. Advances in metallization technology have led to the extensive use of metallized films with higher barrier properties, especially in snack food packaging.

Low-temperature seal (L.T.S.) film can complete heat sealing at a temperature of 65°C. Compared with cold-seal film, L.T.S. film has no limitation on its usable life and presents no registration or contamination problems during packaging use. Although the heat-seal films provided by flexible packaging producers have these advantages, manufacturers that package food on production lines still tend to prefer cold-seal film. Cold-seal film offers many advantages over L.T.S. film in terms of packaging speed, ease of use and causing no damage to chocolate products; at the same time, flexible packaging producers enable cold-seal film to perform perfect registered cold sealing at high packaging speeds, making it a very effective process.

When latex-type cold-seal coatings are used to package chocolate, their odor often affects the taste of the chocolate; this problem can be fundamentally solved by using synthetic cold-seal adhesive. Synthetic cold-seal adhesive has now matured, and Mars has decided to use synthetic cold-seal adhesive for packaging food from now on.

1. Packaging trends

Overall, the flexible packaging market has maintained a growth momentum of more than 5% per year. The projected growth rate for fresh-keeping product packaging was previously 30%, but over the past two years certain segments of this product have reached a growth rate of 50%. As breathable film technology continues to improve, this type of packaging will become a growing market for packaging processors.

Changes in demographic statistics show that more and more households are headed by single parents, single people or dual-income couples, from which we foresee that PET film used for microwave food packaging will continue to grow, especially in replacing home-cooked meals.

1. Unification of packaging specifications

A manufacturer's wish to use globally standardized, uniform packaging specifications for the same product produced in different countries has not yet been realized. Fritolay is just a unique example of focusing on globally standardized packaging.

Regarding this phenomenon, the fairly consistent view is that the differences between markets around the world are too great to determine whether standardized packaging would bring benefits, or whether the conditions of the local sales market should be given priority.

In any case, flexible packaging producers must provide the highest product quality and the best service at moderate prices; in fierce competition, only flexible packaging producers with world-class standards can succeed.

1. Meeting the challenge

Customers' requirements for flexible packaging producers are very clear:

1. Products should have the highest quality.
2. Management of the "supply chain" is a major requirement, and the related management work and costs are very likely to be borne by the flexible packaging supplier.
3. Another trend is consignment storage, in which the flexible packaging producer stores packaged goods according to the customer's prior requirements and charges a fee according to the specific quantity only when the customer decides to use them. Although this step, as part of "supply chain" management, does not reduce costs, it links the "supply chain" with the flexible packaging producer and meets the market's demand for short-run products.
4. Most customers also require product packaging with more colors and a lower price.
5. Because customers require low prices, high quality and urgent delivery times, the burden on flexible packaging producers increases and profits decline. Profits of flexible packaging producers are falling, and in some cases the profit margin is far below the reinvestment rate.

For example, for a flexible packaging producer with annual sales of USD 50 million, material costs are roughly 55%-60% of total sales; after deducting miscellaneous expenses (including approximately employees' wages, energy, rent and the cost of waste), the flexible packaging producer's profit is roughly USD 1.5 million, equivalent to 3% of sales.

One major problem facing flexible packaging producers is waste. Although waste of as much as 18%-20% has many causes (such as scratches, color deviation, shrinkage, ink spitting, web breaks, creasing, etc.), the waste generated during machine setup and registration adjustment is the main cause of the waste. Reducing waste not only means saving costs for packaging processors, but also reduces non-productive time.

In actual production, flexible packaging producers must control many major cost points in order to achieve maximum cost efficiency. How should printing equipment manufacturers develop and innovate to ensure that the flexible packaging industry can meet the challenges of today, tomorrow and the future? They should enable flexible packaging producers, through the use of the equipment manufacturer's proven leading technologies, to improve internal cost control and adapt to market prices.

Tapping the potential of equipment is an integral part of flexible packaging producers' continuous development and optimization of operating practices and process steps. As an equipment manufacturer, we maintain very close ties with the flexible packaging industry around the world and have carefully studied packaging processors' need to improve internal efficiency.

We meet the future needs of the packaging industry through the following measures:

1. Minimize film and ink waste to effectively increase profits;
2. Minimize setup and preparation time, so that short runs and long runs

are no longer a contradiction;

1. By reducing time consumption and manual adjustment work, enable operators to focus more attention on print quality.

Flexible packaging producers want equipment setup time to be as short as possible, and with the maturing of electronic shaft press manufacturing technology this wish has become reality. Compared with conventional gravure presses, electronic shaft systems can significantly reduce the setup and preparation time for new print jobs. In addition, if a flexible packaging producer has a nine-color electronic shaft press and the average number of colors used is seven, the remaining two printing units can be used for preparatory work, including inking up and running the doctor blade, which reduces setup and preparation time by a further 20% on the above basis. Another advantage of the electronic shaft press is that plate change time can be reduced to about one minute.

Assuming a flexible packaging producer has average annual sales of USD 50 million, its ink cost should be close to USD 5 million. Calculating on the basis of changing 20 products per day, about 2,400 kg of diluted ink is recovered from the press, of which 80% is recycled and returned to the press for use. Calculating the diluted ink at USD 2.8 per kg, the annual cost reaches USD 336,000.

Saving ink can significantly increase company profits. Our solution is to adopt a new type of shallow ink pan, in which the floating roller is positioned very close to the plate cylinder. The shallow ink pan can reduce the total amount of ink required for the production cycle to 7 liters, greatly reducing the amount of ink that needs to be recovered and processed. Based on the above example, the amount of recovered ink drops from 2,400 kg to 840 kg, thereby reducing the total cost of ink processing to USD 118,000. It can thus be seen that ink purchasing costs alone can be saved by USD 218,000.

We are now designing a new type of machine suitable for short-run printing, whose ink supply system will circulate a smaller amount of ink.

1. Waste management

Flexible packaging producers continue to look for low-cost production methods; to achieve this goal, strict control over the use of raw materials is the most critical factor.

As we mentioned earlier, the largest material waste in the production process is the waste generated by machine setup and misregistration. If fine adjustment of operations and process steps are closely linked, a stable and at the same time predictable waste level can be obtained.

Compared with conventional presses, electronic-shaft-driven gravure presses have made a major breakthrough in reducing setup time and registration waste. Gravure presses using electronic shafts are already in use in some countries; they can accelerate from 30 m/min to the set production speed, with an acceleration rate twice that of conventional mechanical shaft presses, and the printed products produced during acceleration are accurately registered and saleable.

The same is true during deceleration. Because motor speed is optimized and unique software is used, we can correct the position of the plate cylinder with an adjustment increment as small as 1 µm, thereby ensuring precise registration.

In addition to reduced registration waste, because the compensating rollers have been eliminated, the web path length on the press is also nearly 20% shorter than on conventional presses. On electronic shaft presses, print registration is achieved by electrically driving each plate cylinder directly to correct the plate cylinder position, so the creasing caused by compensating rollers on conventional gravure presses does not occur. If an electronic shaft gravure press is used to print repeat jobs, the length of setup material required will be far less than with a conventional gravure press.

In summary, applying electronic shafts and the shallow ink pan system to gravure presses will greatly reduce web path length, setup waste, registration waste, the amount of ink recovered and setup time. Calculating on the basis of a job that includes 3 repeat products and 1 new product, waste can be reduced by about one third and setup time shortened by 40%.

Taking a flexible packaging plant with sales of USD 50 million as an example, the above improvements can increase profits by at least USD 1 million through reduced setup time and registration waste.

1. Lightweight cylinders

Another new technology that can significantly reduce flexible packaging producers' upfront costs is the use of lightweight gravure cylinders.

Newly developed plastics processing technology can ensure that cylinders become more robust, and manufacturing costs can be reduced by simplifying the cylinder base.

Lightweight cylinders up to 1.2 meters wide can now be manufactured. Conventional gravure platemaking (electronic engraving on a copper-based plate cylinder followed by a chrome protective layer) has now evolved into platemaking using plastic-based gravure cylinders.

The first plastic-base gravure platemaking plant to enter commercial production will complete equipment installation by the end of the year. The plant's production procedure is to first copper-plate the plastic base and polish it to the required dimensions, after which a gravure platemaking company provides guidance for digital engraving via ISDN and carries out refurbishment of used cylinders.

Once the system is put into operation, the engraving cost of plastic-base gravure cylinders will drop significantly.

Used plastic-base cylinders can be repolished and engraved with new patterns, and the cost is expected to be 25% lower than the imaging cost of the photopolymer plates currently used in flexographic printing. The significant reduction in platemaking costs will strongly draw the packaging market's attention to the gravure process.

1. A new generation of gravure presses

The Rotopak4000 new-generation gravure press was conceived by Leduwensi after incorporating the suggestions and ideas of countless users around the world, and its features are as follows: maximum web width of 1600 mm, production speed of 300 m/min to 600 m/min, the "X" series high-efficiency dryer, trolley-type design for fast changeover, electronic shaft technology and the advanced "Cosmoline X" monitoring system, fully digital control, and fast registration adjustment during both acceleration and deceleration.

At the Drupa exhibition, Leduwensi exhibited the Rotopak4000-1 and Rotopak4000-2 series gravure presses.

The Rotopak4000-2 ES electronic shaft gravure press features a fully automatic trolley positioning and locking system. Users can choose either to replace the entire trolley or to replace only the ink supply system or the plate cylinder. The Rotopak4000-1 ES electronic shaft gravure press is a high-efficiency model designed for fast changeover; after a new trolley is prepared on the drive side, all printing unit trolleys can be changed automatically in sequence without operator intervention.

In conclusion, as an equipment manufacturer, we hope that by providing users with satisfactory equipment we can ensure that they have a competitive advantage in both today's and tomorrow's market competition.

This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-375239.html. All rights belong to the original author; this article is for industry exchange and learning only.