Adhesives manufacturer Lintec was recognised for its sustainability achievements at Labelexpo.
The company has led the way in replacing solvent pressure sensitive adhesives with solvent-free pressure sensitive adhesives through its Kinath brand of products.
By 2013, 71 per cent of all Lintec's label printing materials were solvent-free.
A recent environmentally friendly product release in the Kinath series was the KP5000, which uses sustainable facestock and the world’s highest percentage of recycled PET pellets (80 per cent), coming from old PET bottles.
Lintec was also the first in the industry to successfully introduce a mechanical recycling process, which leads to better results than the traditionally used processes of material or chemical recycling.
This allows Lintec to produce recycled PET film labels with equivalent properties to virgin PET film labels, leading to a CO² emission reduction of 24 per cent over the whole production process at a lower cost than for other recycled materials.
Making use of recycled materials as part of a life-cycle assessment of the production leads to a better conservation of scarce petroleum resources.
In other company news, Lintec recently developed an easy-to-apply and outgassing-resistant labelstock that provides a release mechanism for volatile gases commonly found within plastics, preventing the formation of blisters beneath the label. It will be launched in January 2016.
Lintec also recently developed eight new adhesive materials for use in stickers and labels, which will be launched in order from November. These include:
- Oil-tolerant labelstock treated with a unique adhesive to enable application to steel plates and other oily surfaces.
- Oil- and water-repellent labelstock is an adhesive film with the capacity to repel water and oil due to the special surface coating.
- Flame-retardant labelstock, which has a reduced risk of label combustion due to the adhesives containing halogen-free flame retardant agent.
- Ultra-thin white labelstock – a thin-film labelstock for which the total thickness of the facestock and adhesive is kept to just 18 µm. Even though the layer of adhesive is very thin, it offers high adhesion.
- Extra-low adhesion labelstock employing an innovative new adhesive that can be easily applied, removed and re-applied.
- Non-conductive gunmetal labelstock – a metallised labelstock with a gunmetal appearance that adds a luxurious finish to product labelling and branding without using aluminum.
- Recycled PET labelstock – an environmentally friendly labelstock produced from recycled PET resin film made from PET bottles.
- Bubble-free labelstock, which is an outgassing-resistant labelstock providing a release mechanism for volatile gasses trapped under the face material.
