The future of water-based inks

When environmental protection requires printers to implement strict environmental goals, there is a chain reaction in all aspects of the supply of raw materials throughout the printing industry. In order to eliminate the VOCS released by solvent-based systems, ie to meet the EPA (the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) requirements for reducing or eliminating VOCS, printers are beginning to seek new technologies. For ink formulators, one possibility is to develop a water-based system that can reduce VOCS. Now that ink painting has been improved, it has had a major impact on many areas of the printing industry, especially for flexo printing. It is foreseeable that ink painting will continue to grow. The future development of ink painting depends on the orientation of the EPA; it depends on whether the printer's existing incineration, absorption, and disposal control equipment depreciates and shifts to water-based printing; it depends on the ink-and-wash manufacturers to further improve the ink-and-wash performance in order to gain more market share.
Specifically, the future development trend of ink painting is:
First, to further improve the performance of ink to make it easier to use.
The progress of ink-ink technology is gradually accepted by the flexographic printing market. This is mainly due to the fact that ink ink has been surpassing solvent-ink systems for many years and has advantages in ease of use and simple printing. Nowadays, when the flexographic industry compares and selects ink or solvent inks; confidence in ink has risen so that more printing work has been done by aqueous flexo printing. Recently in Europe and North America, product innovation has been driven primarily by meeting user requirements. The specific requirements for ease of use come from users, which will also be the driving force for new product development. The current performance requirements of ink users are: PH stable ink system, the ink manufacturing industry must develop a stable PH value in the printing process, that is, in the printing without having to detect and adjust the PH value; re-solubility is another important In the research field, the resin tends to cure during the volatilization of amines, even on the printing plate. Recently, ink manufacturers have improved the performance of the resin to make it easier to dissolve, which means that the printing system can be operated for a longer time before cleaning, ie, the throughput is increased; the ink application requires continuous improvement in the application of the polyethylene substrate. Performance; Alkali resistance of ink printing packaging, and application in frozen food packaging. The ink-and-wash manufacturing industry is expected to increase the surface resistance of ink-and-ink printing products to make more products water-based, especially in terms of oil resistance, grease resistance, and better heat and freezing resistance.
Secondly, keeping up with environmental protection will also be the key to the future profitability of ink painting. In the future, whether the market can enter another climax, the ink-and-wash manufacturing industry regards the government’s initiatives as the ultimate driving force. The EPA has always demanded that the final zero emissions of VOCS will mean for printers that the gradual reduction of VOCS emissions will eventually promote the use of ink. At this stage, there are pressures from various sources that environmental issues will be further noticed. In order to achieve increasingly stringent environmental management goals, printers are always looking for new ways of solvent ink printing operations to meet government regulations. The current focus of the printing industry is on enhancing the handling of emissions from solvent ink printing. The usual practice is to use "incinerators" to absorb and incinerate VOCS. Others are more creative in the application of micro-organisms or bacteria processing systems that feed on VOCS. . All of these methods rely on the efficient absorption of VOCS for transport to systems that can be neutralized or incinerated or absorbed by microorganisms. Although the environmental protection department still does not have a thorough and detailed development plan, it only continues to strengthen guidance and management. However, we believe that the strong guidance of environmental protection will have a significant impact on the final transition to ink and wash.
In short, under the joint efforts of relevant industries, that ink suppliers provide better water and ink, film supplies are more easily water surface, printer manufacturers to create a better drying equipment for water-based systems, the use of ink will surely This continues to grow and provides a very viable path for printers to follow the low VOCS process.