Last 29th September at Remac headquarters in Piacenza was held an open house organized by the manufacturer of converting machines and Sun Chemical which made available a coating and a barrier adhesive for the production of single-material structures, that match perfectly with the characteristics of the new machine. Many converters participated in the laminating demos on the new Leg0 by Remac.
“Protect your packaging, save your future”, was the title of the open house which took place last September at the headquarters of Remac, coating & laminating machine manufacturer in partnership with Sun Chemical, which has developed solvent inks, coatings and barrier adhesives to be able to create single-material laminates in line with market demands as regards sustainability, in particular in line with recyclability standards.
As recalled by Fiorenza Raggi, Marketing & Communication Manager of Sun Chemical, Plax Packaging also took part in the project, which printed the subject which was then laminated during the open house, TecnoPrint which supplied the gravure cylinders for printing, and Lenze, Re and Rossini for the various components present on the machine. “We are strongly committed to sustainability, so much so that we have been producing a corporate sustainability report for 13 years now in line with the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals. Today’s consumers are increasingly sensitive to these issues and through our highly innovative products and solutions we support printing and converting market so that business and profit can be naturally combined with attention to the environment”, says Fiorenza Raggi.
This open house, the first carried out at Remac headquarters in Piacenza, showed the perfect integration between technology and materials for perfect control of production costs, thanks to the possibility of applying the coating and the barrier adhesive in line and in a single pass, in order to replicate the performance of conventional materials with a single-material and therefore more recyclable structure.
Leg0: a project to accompany the customer on his growth path
For those who would like to learn more about Remac, we invite you to read the interview published in Converter Flessibili-Carta-Cartone in July/August and on converter.it portal, in which Sergio Piga told us about his growth path and specifically the latest news regarding the Leg0 project. We are talking about a modular machine, available in 3 different versions, which can be upgraded from the basic model to the most equipped, with the addition of some modules with a machine downtime of approximately 15 days. The advantage for the customer of being able to equip themselves with a simple entry level laminator, and over time thinking about upgrading it to a Duplex or Triplex, without necessarily having to replace the machinery is clear and evident.
“We are small, but we have always tried to offer highly innovative solutions that are able to satisfy customer needs. We were the first to design compact solventless laminators on three columns, to patent and insert automatic washing on solventless groups (a system later also used by other manufacturers), we designed and patented the mixer for solvent-based adhesives, and our vocation of proposing innovative technologies has led us to create the Leg0 modular project today”, says Sergio Piga, owner of Remac.
The solution presented during the open house was a standard Leg0, characterized by an excellent price-quality ratio, capable of carrying out multiple jobs. The machine can work in traditional solventless mode, but also as a gravure coating machine or as demonstrated during the event, it can carry out a coating with a barrier lacquer combined with the coating of a solventless barrier adhesive. This process makes it possible to reduce the delivery times of the product to the end customer, allows the materials warehouse to be managed in a more streamlined manner, allowing the customer to purchase neutral materials and, based on production needs, creates what he needs, without necessarily having to purchase materials treated or purchased on behalf of third parties to ennoble the two materials.
Sun Chemical’s commitment to sustainable and recyclable packaging: products and solutions for every need
Attilio Borlenghi, Business Unit Manager SAPICI SunChemical Group, presented Sun Chemical solutions for inks, coatings and barrier adhesives for the production of single-material laminates, and finally, before the lunch, the highly anticipated demo for the production of single-material packaging with oxygen barrier, ideal application for packaging of dry food products. “I was reading a recent research which showed that multi-material packaging structures have and will have an annual decline rate of 2-3% for the next 10 years, while single-material packaging will grow in the same period of time by 5-6% per year”, begins Attilio Borlenghi, underlining that choosing the single-material to guarantee the performance of more complex structures is not just a technical question, but rather it is a need that converters are increasingly requesting in order to provide sustainable and recyclable products to their customers in the food and non-food industry.
The world of flexible packaging today is characterized by a great variety of structures depending on the food to be packaged, from the simplest to the most complex ones for modified atmospheres. The main reason for such varied and complex structures, and it is also the secret of the success of this sector, is the ability to combine different properties, obtaining a finished product that combines the specific peculiarities of the single materials.
The current trend is to be able to replicate multi-material structures with a single-material structure. “Sun Chemical’s response to this need lies in the functionalization of materials, that is, through the use of inks, lacquers, coatings, adhesives, we try to replicate multi-material structures. In the project with Remac we used a 25 micron BOPP polypropylene printed by Plax Packaging with our inks, to which was applied a very thin layer of single-component barrier coating (0.6 g per m2) and laminated with solventless barrier adhesive, thus obtaining a single-material with performances capable of extending the shelf-life of the product, in this case of dry food products”. Borlenghi concludes underlining that the novelty of the proposed solution lies in the combination of the coating and in particular the barrier adhesive proposed by Sun Chemical, patented by the Japanese parent company DIC, which allows the combination of coating and adhesive to repair those microdefects, which generally represent the weak points of single-material structures, giving superior performance to the obtained material and capable of replacing multi-material structures.
