Page 14 - Print 21 magazine Jul-Aug 2021

Green Printing
As the world turns
to environmental awareness, everyone
is having to play their part. For businesses the drive comes from their own desire
to do the right thing, and crucially from their customers, an increasing number of whom want to know that their suppliers are making every effort to reduce their environmental impact. Government, corporates and retailers in particular are concerned to ensure they are on the right side of the green drive, and as major print buyers, they are increasingly insisting that printers up their environmental credentials.
Wide format media, and PVC
in particular, is not known for its environmental credentials – indeed PVC is environmentally problematic; it uses chlorinated chemistry, has toxic additives, presents environmental and health hazards, and is increasingly subject to those PVC avoidance policies from major customer groups.
However, PVC is widely used in the graphics industry; it is freely available, cheap, and holds ink well. Pressure to move away from it, though, is growing.
German coatings manufacturer Neschen, represented here by Starleaton, has an alternative, and one that offers other important benefits as well as addressing the environmental issues.
EasyDot PP is a self-adhesive printing film that holds colour just as well as PVC, but crucially can
14 Print21 JULY/AUGUST 2021
be recycled into many products. It can be disposed of safely, it has no dangerous toxins, and as part of
the EasyDot family, it comes with the ease of application through its bubble technology, and an ease of release, that has seen its application rates turbo charged.
German Kallmeyer, international sales manager at Neschen says, “Two years ago we noticed for the first time the demand for PVC-free products from the market, especially from the big brands such as H&M, Loreal, Ikea. So we started the project to develop PVC-free EasyDot solutions with PP and PET films using the Neschen dot pattern coating.”
That project is coming to fruition with Neschen now manufacturing EasyDot PP for UV printers, with other versions coming soon. Kallmeyer says, “Last year we launched the first range of UVprint PP EasyDot, in white and transparent, and they are being followed by a couple of new PVC-free EasyDot products based on PET this year.”
Neschen, the manufacturer, is a niche operator in a field of the giant corporates. This has meant that while it doesn’t operate so much in the volume market, it is agile and more able to develop innovative products to suit specific markets. The 130-year- old business has a long tradition of innovation that has kept it at the forefront of the market. Starleaton has been the supplier in Australia and New Zealand for many years.
Graphics – wide format print
Above
The Neschen EasyDot
PP media supplied
by Starleaton is an environmentally friendly PVC-free film, which is also easy to apply and self-apply, thanks to its innovative dot technology. Wayne Robinson writes.
media – is one of three areas it operates in, along with what it
calls documents – essentially book covers – and industrial, in which the company offers bespoke solutions according to the application requirement – for instance it developed a post-surgical film that could absorb blood.
It was when talking to print customers a decade ago that the company first decided to develop EasyDot. The media has bubbles
in its base layer, which essentially means that application is, as the name suggests, easy. It is so easy that anyone – and not just the sign and display printers – can apply it. That includes shop owners who may be more at home selling clothes, for instance, but can easily apply the graphics to their shop window themselves. This remains the base technology for the EasyDot PP PVC-free media.
Kallmeyer says, “We then conducted research with a major retailer in Germany which revealed that only 70 per cent of their 1000 stores were using the campaign materials they had been sent. Some 30 per cent thought it was too hard to install. Then, at around the same time, I was in Moscow talking with
a Neschen customer, and we were discussing the time they had to spend going to out-of-the-way stores to install the print graphics. They were supplying 3000sqm of media for a retail chain, but were spending hours going to far-flung stores in the regions to install the campaign.
Green
graphics
Green printing: Material solutions