From sustainable functionality to unpacking what the future holds
We need to help steer the packaging industry toward a more sustainable future. We can only do this by creating products that meet the needs of our customers – from the moment the packaging is created until it reaches the consumer’s hands.
Challenge: Meeting multilayered requirements
The printing and packaging industry is facing vast expectations from individuals, companies, and lawmakers alike. Manufacturers are looking for high-quality, consistent performance and easy processability to keep their production running smoothly. Consumers want more sustainable packaging but also want to experience an exciting, luxurious look and feel of the packaging on a par with that of the packaged items themselves. And legislators are constantly tightening regulatory requirements to ensure that the materials we come into close contact with each day are safe and more sustainable.
Within our Printing and Packaging division, we’re going the extra mile to create coatings and adhesives for solutions that tick all those boxes. What’s more, we strive to materialize new opportunities that go one step further, surprising and inspiring our partners as well as end consumers.
Status: Long-term experience in packaging of all kinds
Printing and packaging has always been our passion. Our adhesives, primers, inks, and overprint varnishes are meeting today’s market demands by delivering durable, highly functioning, and more sustainable solutions for multiple packaging types: for food and nonfood goods, from metal cans and rigid, metal packaging to flexible packaging or paper and paperboard packaging. Take a look at four exemplary fields of application and learn how our material innovations can brighten the world of printing and packaging.
Skins®
Skins® is our family of innovative overprint varnish products. They provide a one-stop-shop solution for all your coating needs. In addition to their excellent protecting properties, our Skins® range allows designers to create packaging that not only looks great, but also features specific tactile sensations, like silk or velvet. This creates a memorable brand experience in applications such as paper products, skin care, pouches, bottles, and many more.
Ink resins portfolio
Our ink resins are the basis for high-quality printing on packaging made from paper, metal, and plastic alike. For over 30 years, we have been developing solutions that intensify colors, sharpen details, and create higher contrast across various industries, including food and beverage, pet food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.
We use this experience to manufacture one of the highest performance ink resins and deliver on the needs of our customers. In particular, our resins facilitate high machine speeds without compromising on print quality while ensuring an appropriate ink transfer, appropriate coverage, and the thinnest ink layer possible. Our customers also profit from the material’s re-solvability: dry ink can be re-solved with fresh ink during the printing process. On top of that, the resins stand out due to their chemical and physical resistance, providing high print quality on the substrate.
Barrier coating resins
Many of our coating solutions facilitate the development of more sustainable food packaging. When used in paperboard packaging, extrusion polymers like LDPE can be avoided, which are difficult to recycle. The demand for sustainable paper and paperboard packaging has grown dramatically in recent years. Consumers have become increasingly mindful of the effects their buying choices have on the environment. This has put significant pressure on paper and paperboard packaging producers to eliminate their use of barrier coatings that employ polyethylene, paraffin-based waxes, silicones, and fluorochemicals and to switch to more sustainable barrier coatings, especially in food and beverage packaging applications.
Monomaterials and flexible packaging
Achieving circularity can be challenging for packaging manufacturers, especially when it comes to flexible barrier packaging. Recycling often requires separating various polymers and metal foils – which can be expensive or impractical. Manufacturers face the challenge of simplifying their flexible barrier packaging. This often involves moving toward monomaterials constructed from similar, or identical, polymer grades that can be recycled as a single substance.
In line with the growing need for monomaterial solutions that retain functional performance, we offer a portfolio of coating resin solutions. These enable manufacturers to replace extra material layers with thin functional coatings – enabling high-performance monomaterial packaging.
Next: On the lookout for the next big thing in printing and packaging
We are never satisfied with simply fulfilling existing consumer expectations and market requirements – we anticipate the needs our partners will have tomorrow and make those needs our clear objective today. In the printing and packaging industry, this means we are ready to support the ambitious goals shared by major packaged-goods companies, retailers, hospitality and food service companies, and packaging producers:
- By 2025, 100% of guest packaging at one of the largest fast-food chains is to come from renewable, recycled, or certified sources.
- By 2025, all plastic packaging of a major multinational consumer-goods company will be designed to be fully reusable, recyclable, or compostable.
- Major coffee chains have launched an industry-wide manifesto with the objective of significantly increasing paper-cup recovery and recycling rates by 2020.
