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.