PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2013

LABELLING 32 PET planet insider Vol. 14 No. 03/13 www.petpla.net Volker Till; Till GmbH It doesn’t always have to be a label The personalised approach is the latest trend. The customer makes their own personal statement in the car they choose to drive for example. Now, they can go one step further. In the beverages or cosmetic industries the customer is able to choose their own personal labels. “However, these suppliers are generally working on a handicraft basis“ says Volker Till, the founder of Till GmbH and he goes on: “What we want is an individual bottle design coupled with the highest level of performance – and we want to do it at a quarter the price of a no-label look“. Till prints directly on to the bottle using ink. To do this, his company has developed a printing station that slides the bottle into a preliminary treatment stage. Here, depending on the material from which it is made, the bottle is sub- jected to flame treatment or exposed to an atmospheric plasma.The next stage is to print a white foundation and harden the paint using UV diodes. The actual colour printing takes place in the same station using up to seven additional colours or lacquers. The final stage of the process is for the UV laser diodes to harden the paint layer. Once printed, the bottle goes back into circu- lation ready for filling. It is possible for a station to print up to 1,000 containers/h on a 70mm print area. The print area can be up to 180mm and if required the bottle can be printed two or three times at different heights in the station. With the station having a 140mm outside dimension, the prototypes are already designed with an eye to their use in a carousel. For a 36,000bph plant, the pitch diameter of the carousel would be only 2.2m, i.e. similar to the dimen- sions of a labelling machine. The present development will permit bottle diameters up to 100mm. This covers the spectrum from small to 2-litre size bottles. All the important components such as printers and hardening diodes have already proved their suitability for industrial usage within the ceramics and the flooring industries. The men from Hattersheim, Germany, have developed the printer control them- selves, together with the mechani- cal design. Anyone who remembers Volker Till from his days as Head of Development at KHS would be amazed to see the mechanical design. All currently-used materials, PET, glass, metal, PP or PE, are suit- able as materials for bottles or cans. Together with his colleagues, Till has developed the inks so they adhere perfectly to the materials. They are food safe and, being environmentally- friendly, will wash off in the suds when the PET bottles are recycled. During PET recycling the ink residue can be extracted via an alkaline filter. Till’s development prints the bot- tles contact-free so that even built-in design features such as grooves or ornaments can be overprinted neatly and presentably. This offers new opportunities for the bottle designer, as he does not need to make provi- sion for any tube-shaped elements for labels on the body of the bottle. Addi- tional reinforcement grooving could be introduced to give lightweight bottles additional stability or the shape of the bottle could be modified for marketing purposes, away from today’s tradi- tional designs. From a commercial viability point of view, dispensing with labels and glue offers many advantages. All the present day logistics and warehous- ing is completely done away with, including the mandatory operator of the labelling machine. Nobody needs Volker Till wants to offer an individual bottle design.... ...at aquarter the price ...of the no-label-look