Food packaging: It should be colourful, lifelike and economic, whereby the inks play a central role. They must be quickly applied to the cardboard and film and be suitable for foodstuffs. A clean solution is to cure the ink using an electron beam within a few tenths of a second. However, flexographic printing requires that new inks, printing plates and machines are precisely matched to the nearest millimetre. Four companies have developed a machine that requires just a sixth of the energy used in previous printing processes.

In 2007, Dr. Volker Linzer was repeatedly frustrated. Although he knew a way to print flexible packaging that saved considerable energy, for commercial use he still lacked a colour – “white ink for first-form printing” – as well as an industrially ripe printing process.

The laboratory head of a leading printing ink producer therefore met up with the manufacturers of printing machines and printing plates as well as with a printing company. The subsidised project, “Energy savings in flexographic printing using electron beam curing”, was born. A good two years later, four machines are already running in Europe with the new process. The four companies have opened up considerable savings potentials for the printing industry.