With sustainability, costs, and quality all paramount for label converters, suppliers have gone to great lengths to optimize products and develop services to meet these demands. Flint Group boasts numerous initiatives designed to meet the latest trends in label and package printing, and Marc Heylen, senior director, Narrow Web R&D & Technology, Flint Group, sits down with L&NW to explore how the company has answered these trending topics.

L&NW: What topics are Flint Group seeing as trending and ‘top of mind’ for label and packaging printers and converters?
MH: Several topics are recognized across the label and packaging sector, high among which sits sustainability. Evolving consumer and brand expectations are steering the industry toward more environmentally conscious designs, with bio or recycled content, recyclability, and material choice among the top issues. Converters are concerned about how they can contribute to a more circular label and packaging model, where the materials used in their products can be reprocessed and reused at the end of their lifespans.

However, these conversations around recyclability too often focus on substrate materials while overlooking the important role played by inks and coatings. At Flint Group, we work with organizations that set standards and associations that help influence design for recycling guidance and develop products to enhance circularity.

Closely tied to sustainability is the alignment with regional and global regulations. This topic spans across the entire value chain, where materials are carefully examined for migration and other concerns. Customers can rely on Flint Group to comply with existing legislation and stay ahead of legal requirements. For example, in Europe, the CLP Regulation (Classification, Labelling and Packaging) lays down the criteria determining whether a substance or a mixture of substances is harmful. Another example is the Colombia Notification Regulation in Latin America. And in the US, as well as abroad, state and federal legislation and regulations have added reporting requirements or restricted use of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Regulatory topics are constantly evolving; printers and converters seek suppliers who can guide them through these changes. Our teams monitor and take steps to influence, where possible, developing legislation to ensure that our product technologies meet regulatory demands.

Also at the top of mind for label and package printers is maintaining efficiency and quality in the face of rising costs. This continues to be a significant challenge for many printers and emerging technologies offer potential solutions. While some printers are exploring the option of digital printing to complement traditional flexo, others are examining how advances in ink technology can optimize their processes and keep costs down. UV LED ink and coating technology represents one such product – high-performance dual-curing inks and coatings provide printers with faster, consistent curing performance while minimizing energy consumption. Moreover, these inks, which can cure under both traditional UV lamps and UV LED lamp technology, are helping to simplify the transition to UV LED by enabling printers to transition unit by unit, or press by press, avoiding unnecessary ink inventories and waste.

L&NW: How is the adoption of UV LED technology progressing compared to traditional UV, and what are the benefits?
MH: UV LED curing has experienced significant growth over the past three years due to several factors, including rising energy costs, the need to reduce carbon footprints, and decrease waste. Narrow web converters globally recognize UV LED as a proven and viable technology, appreciating its comprehensive benefits: lower printing costs, reduced waste, no ozone generation, no mercury lamps, and increased productivity.

Expanding further on the benefits, UV LED inks and coatings are designed to cure at the substrate level when exposed to specific wavelengths, providing improved ink adhesion and curing in seconds. UV LED lamps are also more energy efficient than UV lamp equivalents which contain mercury, potentially reducing energy consumption by up to 80% and producing far less heat radiation. 

Additionally, compared with traditional UV curing, UV LED lamps have lower maintenance requirements, as their lifespans can be anywhere from 25 to 50 times longer. What’s more, with incoming regulations set to prohibit mercury use in lamps due to its toxicity, UV LED curing is enabling printers to get ahead of legislative change.

Other factors are also boosting adoption, including a more extensive range of UV LED lamps, giving printers and converters more lamp options. Furthermore, narrow web converters investing in new UV flexo presses can either choose UV LED or a lamp system that can be quickly and economically upgraded to UV LED when needed.

Finally, dual-curing inks are available and designed to help printers start reaping the benefits of this technology while minimizing upfront disruption and costs. With our leading range of EkoCure Dual Cure products, customers can seamlessly adopt UV LED on a new press while maintaining their conventional UV presses, requiring only one ink series for both.

L&NW: What are Flint Group’s newest products designed to meet customer requests?
MH: Flint Group offers a suite of products designed to meet customer requests for more sustainable printing. For example, our Evolution range supports printers in striving toward a more circular label economy. Featuring a Deinking Primer and Caustic-Resistant Overprint Varnish (OPV), Evolution is designed to enhance shrink sleeve recyclability by ensuring clean separation of label and substrate, increasing material yield by up to 10%. This range won the Sustainable Innovation category at the 2022 Labelexpo Global Label Awards.

Evolution Deinking Primer is ideal for shrink sleeves and is applied to the substrate before the ink to provide strong adhesion throughout the label’s lifespan. During recycling, the Primer enables the ink to be released into the caustic wash so the substrate can be broken down into flakes without risking ink contamination. This ensures that more than 99% of the material can be recycled into something new.

Meanwhile, for alternate recycling streams, Evolution OPV ensures that inks remain on the label during the caustic wash process, avoiding contaminating the washing solution and not impacting the floatability of the label. This means the protected ink can be skimmed off with the floating label into an alternative waste stream.

As customer interest in the sustainability benefits of UV LED increases, Flint Group is supporting them with its EkoCure and EkoCure ANCORA technology. These dual-curing UV LED inks help printers transition to LED at a pace that suits their business, facilitating a gradual changeover and simplifying ink inventory during the switch, so they can begin reducing their energy consumption without overwhelming upfront investments. EkoCure ANCORA is specifically formulated to minimize migration risk, providing a solution ideal for improving efficiency in food labeling and packaging applications.

Flint Group’s Ultra Clear Dual Cure coatings complement this technology by harnessing the advantages of UV LED to provide the clarity and protection required for label and packaging applications. Capable of curing under both UV LED lamps and conventional UV lamps, these coatings offer a solution that facilitates LED adoption without increasing complexity.

L&NW: How does Flint Group prioritize collaboration and partnerships with customers to ensure their needs are met?
MH: Flint Group is proud to support the label and packaging sector with its global support services, including 360°ServiceCode. This program helps customers improve performance, optimize costs, and ensure brand integrity, focusing on a 360° approach to adding value. Through 360°ServiceCode, Flint Group’s support team works with customers to identify their unique needs and aspirations, tailoring product recommendations to ensure the right inks and colors are being used. The company ensures customer ink kitchens are properly equipped, employees are trained to properly dispense inks, and provides recommendations for further improvements based on current industry best practices. This process creates measurable value for customers within their ink rooms and press halls, supported by Flint Group’s print management activities.

FlintLink is another tool by Flint Group to enhance the customer experience. This digital customer platform serves as a single gateway to everything, from order management solutions to the company’s Webshop, ensuring customers can access the information they need, whenever they need it. The platform has recently been upgraded with additional functionality ensuring that FlintLink is increasingly valuable for its users.

L&NW: What role does sustainability play in Flint Group’s product and service developments?
MH: Sustainability is a priority for Flint Group, and the company is dedicated to developing innovations that enhance a circular economy across all packaging markets. This includes narrow web labels and packaging, wide web flexible packaging, and paper and board.

It is within this landscape that Flint Group developed and launched its EkoCure ink technology, which was designed to help printers reduce complexity, enhance productivity, and achieve significant energy savings. The recent development of Evolution Deinking Primer for shrink sleeves and Evolution OPV for wash-off labels supports the industry in improving shrink sleeve recycling. Flint Group also offers service tools like VIVO Color Solutions, which enables customers to achieve accurate and reliable color-matching online. This ensures color recipes are tailored to each customer’s unique ink chemistry, substrate choice, and anilox rollers, reducing substrate and ink waste from failed prints.

With the increasing trends toward sustainability in printing, particularly the circular economy, more and more customers are setting targets for product recyclability and reducing their energy use and carbon footprints. This makes it more important than ever that circularity sits at the heart of Flint Group’s innovation pipeline, and that the company has a clear framework for its sustainability efforts moving forward.

Flint Group’s product innovation strategy includes core elements tailored for each market segment it serves:

1. Developing solutions based on circular, sustainable raw materials.
2. Creating inks designed for the circular economy, focusing on recyclability or compostability.
3. Collaborating with customers on projects that reduce their Scope 1 & 2 emissions.

The company’s PRISM platform, launched in 2022, outlines Flint Group’s commitments to building a better world and drives its activity on the environment. This platform focuses on three core areas: Product (innovating for a circular economy), Planet (reducing environmental impact), and People (ensuring a diverse and inclusive workforce). As part of this work, Flint Group aims to achieve a 46.2% reduction in Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by 2030, based on its 2019 baseline and is proud that these carbon reduction targets have been approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

L&NW: Is there anything else the industry should know about Flint Group’s products and services, as well as plans for the future?
MH: Moving forward, Flint Group will continue to develop a comprehensive set of products and services to support its customers’ current and future needs. The company has outlined an innovation roadmap focused on energy reduction, recycling, carbon footprint reduction, and products free from harmful chemicals. Our next innovation will revolutionize traditional UV mercury printing with a new range of UV inks and coatings that are even more “migration safe” versus the products available today.