Environmental Friendly Ink
10-23-2018 15:09:56

At present, our government departments and trade associations are accelerating the implementation of green printing, the use of green ink is the general trend. So far, the Ministry of Environmental Protection has revised and issued nearly 100 (currently effective) environmental labeling product standards. More than 200,000 types of products have passed the certification of China's environmental labeling products. Especially since 2007, a series of offset ink, gravure ink, inkjet ink and other environmental labeling products have been issued. Product standard. Ink products can be certified by the Central Joint Certification Center and get the certificate of ink environmental identification, and be recommended to enter the government green procurement list, which effectively promotes the market access of green ink. At the 2016 China International Printing Exhibition, the China Printing Technology Association launched the 2016 edition of the Catalogue of Green Raw and Auxiliary Materials, which contains inks, varnishes, inkjet inks and other products, further promoting the pace of application of green raw and auxiliary materials.

With the increasingly stringent government air pollution control regulations, printing companies pay more and more attention to green raw and auxiliary materials. At the 2016 China International Printing Exhibition, ink manufacturers such as Bauhinia, Hanghua Ink and Shengweike have brought their latest green R&D achievements. For printing enterprises, it is urgent to strengthen the end treatment of traditional product production process, but more important is to develop low VOCs and VOCs-free ink products from the source, which requires the cooperation of ink manufacturers. At present, green ink generally includes water-based ink, energy-saving UV ink, vegetable oil ink three categories. Next, I will briefly introduce these three categories of green ink for you.

Water-based ink           

Water-based ink is recognized worldwide as an environmentally friendly printing ink, and is the only one of all printing ink approved by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States.           

Volatile organic solvents (VOCs) free ink is the greatest advantage of water-based ink, in printing only need to use water to dilute. Therefore, water-based ink greatly reduces VOCs emissions, avoids the pollution of volatile organic compounds, improves the printing environment, and does not cause harm to the health of operators. At the same time, it obviously reduces the harmful substances on the surface of printed products, and belongs to one of the ink types that most meet the green environmental protection standards. At the same time, as the main solvent of water-based ink, water is not easy to burn, odorless and non-toxic, so it has high safety performance, will not cause pollution to the environment, is conducive to the improvement of environmental quality. As the boiling point of water is higher than that of organic solvents, the drying temperature of water-based ink is generally controlled at 90-100 degrees Celsius (the air volume is adjusted to the maximum, which is conducive to the rapid discharge of moisture).           

In recent years, with the application of high performance water-borne acrylic resin in water-based ink, the water-solubility, gloss and dryness of water-borne ink have been further improved, so that it has been gradually promoted in flexo and gravure fields, the development speed is accelerated, ink quality has gradually been recognized by printing companies. In addition, the application of water-based ink can also reduce the fire hazards caused by static electricity and flammable solvents, reduce the residual solvent odor on the surface of printed matter, so water-based ink is more and more widely used in food packaging, children's toy packaging, tobacco and wine packaging and other fields.           

Energy saving UV ink            

Energy-saving UV ink is a new branch developed on the basis of traditional UV ink. Its ink composition is similar to traditional UV ink. Its outstanding advantage is that UV curing energy is significantly lower than traditional UV ink. When curing, traditional UV light is no longer needed, but LED light or H-UV light is used. At present, there are mainly LED-UV ink and H-UV ink.           

When traditional UV ink is used, it takes time to exhaust the heat pipe switch lamp, and it produces ozone, which makes operators uncomfortable. LED-UV ink can solidify instantaneous switch light at a single wavelength (365 nm, 385 nm, 395 nm), without ozone generation, and consumes about one fourth of the power of traditional UV ink. H-UV ink is a hybrid UV ink, using short-wavelength UV isolation technology, no ozone, infrared heat generation.            At present, a number of companies have mastered the energy-saving UV ink technology, for printing enterprises using traditional UV ink, as long as the corresponding transformation of the UV lamp group lamp tube, you can use energy-saving UV ink. In recent years, LED lamps have developed rapidly, and the cost is no longer high, which is an important direction of the development of energy-saving UV ink. Especially the use of H-UV ink, just ordinary UV lamp tube can be replaced by H-UV lamp tube, than the replacement of LED lamp tube cost is lower. In the future, energy saving UV ink will be developed rapidly in the field of cigarette printing, labels and other fields. At present, Haizhonghui ink, Hanghua ink, Chinese banknote ink, etc. have launched a better performance of H-UV ink and LED-UV ink.

Vegetable oil type ink           

Offset printing ink in China accounts for nearly half of the total use of printing ink, occupies a leading position in the next 20 years will still develop steadily. Traditional offset printing inks are mostly non environmental friendly, mainly because they contain binder and mineral oil. At present, some developed countries require the use of environmentally friendly inks in food and pharmaceutical packaging printing, such as non-aromatic and solvent-free offset ink (soybean oil type). The international requirements for this type of ink are: aromatic content in non-aromatic ink should be less than 1%, solvent content in non-solvent ink should be less than 1%, heavy metal content should also meet the corresponding requirements. It is the development direction of offset printing ink manufacturing enterprises in the future to substitute organic pigments for inorganic pigments containing harmful heavy metals, strictly use heavy metal raw materials without standard limits, and produce aromatic and solvent-free environmental protection inks.

Vegetable oil based ink is also a typical environmental friendly type of ink. The vegetable oil inks in the United States mainly use soybean oil as raw material, which will not produce harmful substances in the process of application and regeneration. Moreover, soybean oil has better fluidity and coloring, and has better printing effect. It is worth mentioning that the polyolefin materials which can synergistically improve the drying performance of vegetable oil are added to the vegetable oil type ink to solve the problem that vegetable oil can not volatilize and easily lead to ink drying slowing down, which has been well applied in China. At present, SGP soybean offset printing ink has been launched in Shanghai Shenzhen and Japan, which is green and environmentally friendly, with excellent ink balance, good transfer performance and machine stability; GSR series of environmental protection offset printing ink for Chinese banknote printing has good machine stability, clear dot reduction and fast drying; Tempo series of environmental protection printing ink for Shengweike, without mineral oil components.           

At present, the vegetable oil inks on the market are mainly divided into low VOCs vegetable oil inks and non-VOCs vegetable oil inks. Table 1 is the composition of low VOCs vegetable oil inks, non-VOCs vegetable oil inks and traditional inks. As can be seen from Table 1, the main difference among the three is the different proportion of vegetable oil and petroleum solvents in the ink. The proportion of vegetable oil in traditional ink is the lowest, and the proportion of petroleum solvent is the highest; the proportion of vegetable oil in VOCs-free vegetable oil ink is the highest, and the content of petroleum solvent is 0; the low VOCs vegetable oil ink is between the two. The development trend of vegetable oil inks is to replace non-renewable petroleum solvents with renewable and environmentally friendly vegetable oils as much as possible.           

Pure vegetable oil-based ink is the future development direction in the field of ink, and its VOCs emission is estimated to be only 0-1%, which is the best choice for printing enterprises.           

Green development is the trend of ink manufacturing enterprises and printing enterprises transformation. With the further integration of China's standards with international standards, the judgment standard of green environmental protection ink will be further improved, which will increase the application scope of green environmental protection ink, and realize the environmental protection construction of printing industry. In the future, the green cause of ink will continue.

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