Converting Magazine - probably not top of the reading pile for commercial and digital printers - is full of useful information. Today's Converting Industry Update delivered this great piece on "green" coatings:
Converters might tire of talk about sustainability, especially when the current economic climate is dampening their revenue streams. Perhaps this is why current trends in eco-friendly manufacturing tend towards those that can provide “green” of a different sort.
At the "Making the business case for 'green' coatings" presentation and panel discussion at CMM International 2009, panelists Cynthia Forsch from Eco-Logic Strategies; Mike Nowak, president of Coating Excellence International; and Juliet Midlik, VP of sales for Prime UV Systems, Inc., emphasized the bottom-line benefits of some of today's coating technologies.
Noting the importance of corrugated as a transport package, Forsch stated that although 73.6% of US corrugated was recycled by retailers in 2007, 8.24 billion pounds of corrugated was not.
Acknowledging that while corrugated is degradable, Forsch also reminded the audience that organic materials such as corrugated tend to create methane in landfills and methane is 21 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. All the news wasn’t bad though.
Among the success stories shared by Forsch was a switch to recyclable, coated packaging for transporting poultry to be sold as deli chicken by Albertsons. This move helped Albertsons recycle 300,000 tons of old corrugated cardboard (OCC), including the recyclable, coated packaging for chicken.
More here including a discussion of UV coating>>
