In late October, Sun Chemical raised prices from 3-7% on all its packaging inks and coatings for flexible, folding carton and paper packaging sold in the United States, Canada and Mexico. The increases seemed inevitable in light of recent increases in raw material prices by multiple suppliers to the ink industry.

Crude oil is used as a core component in the manufacture of most petrochemicals used in various chemicals for making printing inks. This affects ink chemicals used in all types of inks—from the “obvious” oil-based inks with phenolic resins, to “less obvious” vegetable oil inks using linseed resins built from hydrocarbons. In the packaging sector, all solvent-based inks contain solvents that are petroleum-derived materials, but resins such as nitrocellulose and polyamide resins are also subject to this increase in costs. So the price of these materials rise as a direct effect of the main components in them going up in price. In addition, the oil has an indirect affect as it drives cost of transportation and energy up.

However, this is only part of the story. Steam crackers and refineries had been shut down due to an earlier lack of demand. Now when the demand is increasing, there is insufficient capacity to get the natural gas and oil to the next stage. As such there is a shortage of ethylene derivatives used in solvent-based fluid inks and polymers (made from acrylic acid) used in water-based energy cured inks. Consequently, packaging inks were the initial target for increases.