Earthinks, a relatively new company that specializes in developing environmentally-friendly inks, has announced a new range of gravure inks and specialist coatings, which are made from sustainable and non-polluting resources.
These inks are water-based and made from up to 100% natural ingredients including soy, starch, sugars, dextrin, tree resin, cellulose and other polysaccharides. Natural waxes are used to replace standard petroleum-based synthetics and natural oils are used to defoam instead of mineral oils. They are fully biodegradable and compostable and like all Earthinks products, the new inks are independently tested to ASTM D6866.
There’s also a new range of coatings, which also use 100% natural ingredients and can be used with flexo, screen and gravure inks as well as roller coat applications.
Earthinks has also installed two ink dispensers at separate customer sites – Weedon Group and Single Source – as well as its first in-house customer colour laboratory at Weedon PSC’s Hednesford facility. The Earthinks dispenser allows in-house colour mixing and the ability to facilitate special colour production on-demand. The colour lab improves print quality, colour consistency and production times, vastly improving onsite efficiency.
Earthinks has just won the 2015 Stationers Company Innovation Excellence Award as well as being highly commended in the ‘Sustainable Innovation Award’ category at the British Coatings Federation 2014 Awards Ceremony. The company also received a ‘Green Apple Environment Award’, presented at the 2014 Green Apple Awards for Environmental Best Practice ceremony, which took place last autumn in the Houses of Parliament.
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