DuPont Cyrel presented its latest technologies and solutions alongside hundreds of live demonstrations to improve label printing/converting and create new business goals.

“We consider the show a great opportunity to get closer to the label converters and reinforce our solutions for a more sustainable printing in flexo,” states Tucker Norton, Cyrel general manager at DuPont.

In its booth, DuPont is focusing on high-performing technologies to address label converters’ challenges to achieve their sustainability, productivity, and quality goals.

Cyrel FAST is a thermal platemaking system that consists in a thermal processor and a large variety of photopolymer printing plates for flexible packaging, labels and other applications. The Cyrel FAST is said to offer excellent productivity and performance while helping to reduce processing costs, time, and environmental impact compared to the existing solvent method. By eliminating the use of solvents – including water – from the platemaking process, the Cyrel FAST system require no drying time and plates can be ready for print under 45 minutes.

“The system is an achievement of more than 20 years of continuous evolution and investment into this platform and has resulted in more than 1,500 installations globally. And this year we hit the 200th installation of its latest version, the FAST 2000 TD,” Norton says. 

Addressing sustainability
Recently DuPont published the 2022 Sustainability Report that reinforces the company’s sustainability strategy: to help power its transformation as a premier multi-industrial company and to strengthen its portfolio to deliver long-term value creation. Notable 2021 accomplishments highlighted in the 2022 report include:

• Accelerated and increased our innovation value creation potential aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals with deepened customer insights and specialized capabilities.
• Reduced Scope 1 & 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 10% vs prior year, and completed our Scope 3 inventory, identifying priority value chain reduction opportunities.
• Achieved 15% sourcing of renewable electricity through renewable energy credits (RECs) and entered into a virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA) with a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources, LLC. The VPPA project is scheduled to commence operations in 2023 and is expected to deliver the equivalent of approximately 528,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind-generated renewable electricity annually to the local grid. This is equivalent to approximately 25% of the company’s total electricity needs today.
• Achieved DE&I performance above our benchmarks with 26% gender diversity and 34% ethnic diversity of DuPont senior leaders.
• Delivered strong safety performance in the top 25% of peer companies for Total Recordable Incident performance and Process Safety Tier 1 and 2 incident rates.
• Increased transparency by developing TCFD Index for climate risk assessment and reporting.
• Reduced waste in our operations and along the value chain by diverting 1,230 metric tons of material from landfill and upcycling into higher value applications resulting in a 52% increase over prior year.
• Committed to investing $20 million in the Local Initiatives Support Corporation’s Black Economic Development Fund (BEDF) to incentivize economic activity and wealth building opportunities for Black-led businesses.
• Partnered with water.org to impact more than 100,000 lives in 2021 and improved drinking water access and quality for more than 5 million people through innovative municipal water treatment projects since 2019.
• Participated in over 450 charitable projects in 29 countries impacting over 3.5 million lives since 2020.

According to DuPont, “In terms of products, the report brings the comparation of the conventional solvent platemaking system with Cyrel FAST thermal digital processing system; the result is that  Cyrel FAST is more efficient. According to the third-party reviewed LCA released in 2021 the Cyrel FAST systems is shown to have a 38% lower impact in GWP and a NRE consumption 56% lower compared to the digital system with solvent, excluding the raw plate manufacturing impact. When the plate manufacturing is included, the GWP impact is 17% lower and the NRE consumption, 20% lower, compared to the digital process with solvent. The Cyrel FAST 2000 TD equipment also reduces VOCs emissions in 99.7% due to its patented Catox System.”

The recently launched Cyrel Lightning plates technology received the 2022 FTA Technical Innovation Award. The new Cyrel Lightning plate family is optimized for UV-LED exposure units to make full use of this system’s capabilities. The benefits of the plates include a further optimized match between access time and plate performance, while not compromising the print quality.

Previously, exposure settings on LED units often had to be adjusted for either higher quality or shorter access time. The Cyrel Lightning plates challenge this as they were formulated from the ground up with UV-LED exposure characteristics in mind. The Cyrel LSH represents the first photopolymer plate of the Lightning family. It is solvent processable and currently available in 045 and 067 gauges.