The Only Way for Food Packaging and Printing Enterprises to Use Green Ink
With people's increasing attention to food safety, the problem of harmful substance residues in food packaging and printing has become the focus of consumers'attention. People call on enterprises to pay attention to the environmental protection of packaging materials in printing while paying attention to the production of green food.
Ink becomes the hidden danger of food packaging safety
Green food consumption has become a trend, but it is very inconsistent with it that many green foods do not use green packaging and green printing, but use some toxic and harmful substances as packaging and printing materials. Food packaging is known as "special food additives". As the "personal clothing" of food, its safety will directly affect the quality of food. Unqualified food packaging will have adverse effects on human health in the use process, especially on the healthy development of children and adolescents. In our daily life, we can easily find that many distributors in order to attract the attention of consumers, on food packaging printed with colorful and exquisite patterns, but few people know that the printing ink mostly contains harmful benzene substances.
Zhang Liming, deputy director of the National Quality Supervision and Inspection Center for Printing and Decoration Products, said that solvent-based inks are still the main method of food packaging in China. These inks contain a large number of harmful solvents, such as benzene, toluene, xylene and so on. If benzene exceeds the standard, it will cause cancer, especially blood system diseases. In addition, the contents of heavy metals such as mercury, lead and arsenic in ink also have great harm to human body.
The internationally recognized printing ink for food must abide by the principle of non-transfer; the conventional printing ink should not be used when printing the inner surface of food packaging; the printer must ensure that all solvents in the printing ink volatilize, and the ink should be cured thoroughly, and meet the corresponding standards of the application industry. Thus, the role of ink in food packaging and printing can not be underestimated.
Food packaging calls for environmentally friendly ink products
The safety of printing products will form a new green barrier to trade in China. From the production process of printed matter, ink has undoubtedly become the "protagonist" in this complete industrial chain. Nowadays, most countries in the world advocate the use of environmental protection ink, alcohol-soluble ink and water-based ink, especially water-based ink as green environmental protection ink is more and more widely used in the printing industry.
Water-based ink: Water-based ink is currently used in most flexographic packaging printing inks at home and abroad. It is mainly made of water-soluble resin, organic pigments, solvents and related additives by composite grinding. Water soluble resin is a binder for water-based ink. Water soluble acrylic modified resin is often used as a binder in China. Its heat resistance, weatherability, chemical resistance, pollution resistance and gloss have obvious advantages. Both direct dispersion and synthetic polymer emulsion show excellent performance. Water-based ink does not contain. Volatile organic solvents (VOCs) can not only reduce the toxicity of printing residues, but also prevent ignition due to contact between electrostatic and flammable solvents. VOCs are a new type of "green" printing ink. Water-based ink is also the best substitute for benzene-soluble ink.
Ultraviolet curing ink: Ultraviolet curing ink refers to a certain wavelength of ultraviolet light irradiation, the linker in the ink occurs cross-linking reaction, from liquid to solid to complete the curing of the ink, it is before the linker dissolves, macromolecular prepolymer is firmly formed ink film. Ultraviolet curing ink is mainly used for flexible printing of soft substrates. It consists of prepolymer, reactive diluent, pigment, additive, photoinitiator/synthesizer.
Electron Beam Curing Ink: Electron Beam Curing Ink refers to the ink that can rapidly change from liquid to solid under the irradiation of high-energy electron beam, also known as EB ink. Food and beverage packaging industry mostly uses electron beam curing ink printing, offset printing. EB ink is suitable for the development direction of high-speed and multi-color primary printing in printing industry. The main difference between EB ink and UV curing ink is whether there is a photoinitiator in the binder. When a certain amount of photoinitiator is added to EB ink, UV curing can also be carried out. EB can cure thicker ink layer. Because there is no photoinitiator in the ink, the cost is lower than that of UV curing ink, but the investment of electron beam curing equipment is higher than that of UV curing.
Digital printing ink: Digital printing technology has penetrated into the food packaging and printing industry with the increasing demand for personalized packaging. Digital printing technology can achieve a high enough image resolution and can ideally reproduce the details of the image. Most of the printing materials are foil, metal aluminium, PET (polyester), paper and so on, and suitable for printing web paper. Solvent resistance is also very important for electrostatic digital printing. Prints with poor solvent resistance will not be able to complete the subsequent processes, such as polishing, film coating, etc.
With the tightening of the national food packaging quality and safety policy, environmental protection issues become increasingly important. Food safety has become the focus of global concern and urgent task, and become the development criteria of environmental-friendly ink. Nowadays, with the increasing awareness of environmental protection, people have higher standards for the development of ink. Ink environmental protection has become the trend of the times. In order to adapt to the development of the times, packaging and printing enterprises in China must unswervingly take the road of green development.
