The annual Pharmapack show in January of this year hosted 411 exhibiting companies, 5,366 attendees and 325 delegates. These figures included around 50 directly connected with labels. It is easy to guess why label converters like the pharmaceutical sector. Margins are high, innovation is welcomed and the clientele is generally faithful to its preferred supplier. Autajon, Reynders and CCL, all leading European label converters, exhibited at the Paris show. German-based Schreiner was among the exhibitors showing “smart” solutions, mostly designed for hospital or clinical trial use. For use by the patient, self-injection pens were on display on several booths, many with tamper-evident labels.

The show appeared to be a little smaller than last year’s but still very convivial. This being France, the last hour of the show before closing saw a proliferation of wine, beer and similar wellness beverages to promote healthy networking. On the technical innovation front, your correspondent (who did not let his judgment be clouded by wellness hospitality) found nothing excitingly new. Many exhibitors, when asked what’s new, replied well, nothing much. To hold the show every year in the same city is possibly trying to get a quart out of a pint pot.

The future of flexo
Some years ago, a group of European companies joined forces to improve and streamline flexo technology. A leader in this grouping was the Italian press constructor Nuova Gidue, which in 2015 was acquired by Lausanne-based Bobst. The Swiss press manufacturer has not been slow in taking up the latest in pre- and post-press technology, and all was laid bare at a grand Open Day in mid-February in Bielefeld, Germany. A small and very select group of journalists also attended the event. The Bobst Bielefeld plant (formerly Fischer & Krecke) makes wide-web CI presses for flexible packaging, but much of the technical innovation is also going into the group’s narrow web presses.

The leitmotif of the day was to extoll the advantages of Extended Color Gamut (ECG). Adding orange, green and violet to the basic CMYK increases the Pantone coverage to over 90%, according to Bobst. Fewer spot colors, reduced inventory and higher press productivity are generally accepted as the plus side of ECG. As to the downside – well, a 7-color CI press running at up to 500 m/m doesn’t come cheap, but Bobst and its partner companies offer a model for sustainability, which should have brand owners ululating in ecstasy. The Bobst presses, and, in particular, the Expert CI and Vision CI on demo at the Open Day, are designed to run water-based inks (though they can also use solvent-based) at very high speeds. Highly automated plate changeovers make shorter run lengths economic, pushing back the encroachment of digital technologies. A particularly impressive live demo showed total web job-change wastage at a mere 50 feet, or less than the length of the press. Prepress specialists like Ulrich Günther Prepress and Esko were on-hand to detail the latest innovations in design-to-print technology. Daetwyler and Zecher weighed in with news about doctor blades and anilox rolls, respectively.

An unexpected bonus away from the day’s machinery bias was a presentation on recyclable barrier materials for flexible packaging.

“Metalizing PET or PE is the most common solution in flexible packaging but it is not recyclable,” said Eric Pavone, business development director for the Bobst Web Fed Business Unit. “Metalized polypropylene and polyethylene are a different kettle of fish; it’s difficult but it can now be done.”

Major brand owners in the food and drink sector are crying out for transparent, recyclable full PE or PP barrier films, he explained, and Silicone Oxide (SiOx) films and Aluminum Oxide (AlOx) coated clear barrier films offer an alternative to metalized PET/PE. This paves the way to more environmentally-friendly packaging with high barrier properties.

People who like splitting hairs have rightly said that “Digital printing” is a contradiction in terms, since putting ink onto a substrate, however you do it, is a non-digital process. Leaving this casuistry aside, the big question on your correspondent’s mind after his day with Bobst was: is all this a new lease of life for flexo, or just a panacea to slow down the aging process? A leading expert attending the Bobst event (who asked not to be named) said privately, “Digital is not eating our lunch yet, and our flexo business is still going up. Narrow web printing is already being hit, wide web not so much. But the time will come…”

Stories from Drorys…and from Mahl
Despite its un-Italian name, Drorys Packlist is a family concern as Italian as Ferrari – and almost as fast in delivering labels, according to CEO Piergiulio Brocani. Drorys’ client base includes such big names as Tic-Tac and Heineken. “For Heineken’s beer labels, we beat off Chinese competition, and to date we have supplied a billion and a half by dint of an innovative solution for labeling the company’s beer bottles using a synthetic fabric for a ‘no-label look’” – not bad for a converter with just 100 employees and sales of €21 million.

Drorys has traditionally printed with gravure but today has offset and digital capacity – and has just invested in a 17" Mark Andy press and three new Rotoflex inspection-rewinders.

Another family-run converter has also been investing – but not in conventional technology. Oscar Mahl GmbH & Co KG in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, celebrated its 100th anniversary by installing an HP Indigo 6900 press.

The reasons given by CEO Erwin Oscar Mahl were the usual ones: “Our customers have always trusted our quality,” he says. “But that alone is no longer enough today. The increasing variety of substrates and the shortened product life cycles are driving run lengths down. Delivery times are much shorter than a few years ago. Whoever gets their product on the retailer’s shelf first has won half the battle. We can meet these challenges but only with a digital press.”

In choosing the HP 6900, Mahl also improved its 7-color printing and its sustainability. (Sound familiar?)

The decision, by the show’s organizers, to outright cancel the Mobile World Congress, which was to be held in Barcelona, Spain, in late February, sent tremors through Europe’s exhibition business. Airlines and hotels were badly hit. In another aftershock comes news that the pharmaceutical show CPhI, due to take place in Thailand in March, has been postponed until July of this year. The same tremors were strongly felt in Dusseldorf, which this year is host to both Interpack (May 7-13) and drupa (June 16-26). 170,000 visitors attended the previous packaging show in 2017, some 15% of them from China, Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries in that region.

For drupa, the percentage was similar. The latest Interpack exhibitor lists show just 60 Chinese exhibitors, but how many will be present when the show opens? If, as we all hope, the outbreak has passed its peak, then by the fall of this year things should be getting back to normal. But that may not save the organizers of the two Dusseldorf shows from feeling their Bier glass is at best half-empty.

Halving plastic packaging
Sainsbury’s, a major British retail chain with 250 stores nationwide, has announced dramatic plans to make its operations more environmentally friendly. “We have a duty to the communities we serve to continue to reduce the impact our business has on the environment. We are committing to reduce our own carbon emissions and become Net Zero by 2040, 10 years ahead of the government’s own targets because 2050 isn’t soon enough,” says Mike Coupe, CEO of Sainsbury’s.

Use of plastic packaging is to be halved by 2025. First to go will be plastic bags, along with polystyrene and PVC packaging. Label suppliers have all been advised to clean up their act and be sure their products don’t gum up the recycling process. To help get its customers onboard, Sainsbury has started a deposit-return scheme in five stores for customers to recycle their plastic bottles. As a monetary incentive, each item recycled translates to a six-cent coupon toward their shopping. 

Not as easy as it looks
Security paper manufacturers in Europe continue to have a hard time. It has now been over a year since Arjowiggins Security was forced to close its plant at Jouy-sur-Morin, France. Despite pleas from the local senator, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe last month turned down the request for public funds to enable the plant to reopen. A group of former employees had put forward a business plan, but the government found it contained “too many weak points, such that it would be irresponsible to encourage the former employees in their project.” RIP.

With all of Europe clamoring for more recycled materials, and no chance of selling waste packaging to the Chinese, recycling plants –  unlike security paper mills – should be a license to print money. Well, it ain’t necessarily so, to judge by the sad tale of K&N Papierfabrik in Germany. Bankrupt in February 2018, the plant was bought up by the Premium Pulp & Paper Group. Its recycled products were sold as coated magazine papers and label papers. Now in January 2020, K&N again filed for protection from its creditors. The latest news is that an investor has been found in the form of Schönfelder Papierfabrik, which plans to keep the K&N plant running and to retain most of the 150 employees. The deal is yet to be finalized. Moral: all that glitters is not recycled gold.