KHS among the five companies nominated for the Hermes Award 2014 with its innovative direct printing of PET bottles
With the recently developed KHS Innoprint direct print system for PET bottles KHS GmbH is one of the five companies nominated for this year's Hermes Award. KHS is one of the world's leading manufacturers of filling and packaging equipment for the beverage, food and non-food industries and belongs to the Salzgitter Group.The Hermes Award is one of the most internationally coveted prizes for technology and will be presented by Deutsche Messe AG for the eleventh time at the 2014 Hannover Messe. Dr. Jochen Köckler, member of the board for Deutsche Messe AG, explains further. "This year only a handful of companies have managed to stand out from the crowd. These are the nominees and the winner of the award. The Hermes Award stands for what's essentially the core purpose of the Hannover Messe: to set trends for technical innovations."
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Niemeyer, CEO of KHS GmbH, says, "We're very pleased, as direct printing is a milestone in the decoration of PET bottles. We see our nomination as confirmation of KHS' vision of being first choice in technology and service. What our customers want will continue to be the key impetus for KHS innovations in the future. Here, international proximity to the market, excellent customer management and cooperative partnership have top priority."
With KHS' newly introduced Innoprint technology PET bottles can be directly printed all round. Compared to the plastic or paper labels commonly used to dress bottles to date, this process is much more flexible. In addition, neither glue nor labels are now needed and these thus no longer have to be shipped or stored in air-conditioned warehouses. Besides generating potential cost savings direct printing therefore also scores points for greater eco friendliness. And not just because the around 42 metric tons of labeling material and corresponding amount of glue used in the standard labeling process are now superfluous (at an assumed capacity of 25,000 labels per hour in two-shift operation on 220 days of the year); doing away with the logistics also cuts down on CO2 emissions.
All the KHS Innoprint needs are text and graphics files which it very quickly prepares for printing. In theory, the machine is thus able to print each and every PET bottle with a different motif – at a rate of up to 36,000 bottles per hour. Digital printing considerably shortens time-to-market intervals. For example, at the end of a soccer game bottles could be printed with the result and a picture of the winning team and find themselves in retail stores in a very short space of time. International companies also clearly profit from the innovative system, as all of their sites throughout the world equipped with a KHS Innoprint can simultaneously process centrally supplied data. This enables containers decorated with new motifs to not only reach the various markets very quickly but also at the same time.
The KHS Innoprint deploys inks which are suitable for food use. Their low viscosity and the use of intermediate UV curing also enable motifs to dry quickly and ensure that the ink perfectly adheres to the PET bottles. Recesses in or projections on the bottles can also be printed on. The print quality is excellent; an outstanding optical resolution of 1,080 x 1,080 dpi produces brilliant color images. The standard KHS Innoprint has five color carousels which apply white, cyan, magenta, yellow and black to the bottles in succession according to the CMYK color model. After printing very intense UV light reliably hardens the inks.
To help save resources and make the process sustainable PET bottles which have been directly printed on by the KHS Innoprint are suitable for bottle-to-bottle recycling. Here, the hardened inks can be completely removed from the shredded PET.
KHS believes that its Innoprint technology holds great potential and expects that direct printing will quickly penetrate the market. The company expects that within the next five years around 5% of all PET beverages the world over will be printed on instead of labeled.
At the trade show in Hanover the KHS Innoprint system will be presented in the Research & Technology section in Hall 2, together with the four other products nominated for this year's Hermes Award. KHS, a wholly owned subsidiary of Salzgitter AG, will have its innovation on display at the Salzgitter AG booth in Hall 6 (booth F02).
