"People take food as the sky." Food in food, clothing, housing and transportation account for a large part of our daily expenses. In supermarkets and shopping malls, all kinds of
food packaging bags are dazzling. In addition to the information stipulated by the country, such as the date of production and the place of production of ingredients, the packaging bag is also an important tool for merchant marketing to a large extent. A beautiful food packaging bag is often more attractive to customers. So how are these exquisite patterns printed?
In fact, these patterns are also printed with ink, so there will be residual problems. The printing ink on the surface of the food packaging material is composed of pigment, linking agent, solvent and auxiliary agent. Among them, organic solvents and heavy metal elements cause serious damage to the human body.
The solvents used in gravure inks are generally butanone, xylene, toluene, butanol, etc. Especially butanone, the residual smell is very strong. Although most of these solvents can be removed by drying, the residual solvents will migrate into the food and harm the human body. These residual solvents are brought into the compounding process, which is more difficult to run away after compounding, and will slowly migrate and penetrate, so the solvent residues must be controlled to a minimum.
In order to circumvent and solve the various problems of benzene-soluble inks, environmentally friendly inks came into being and began to be widely used in various countries. Why is it named environmentally friendly ink? That is because this series of ink in the production, use process does not pollute the environment, nor will it harm the use of personnel on the body, but will not let the food in the food you received the package contamination. At present, there are generally three types of environmentally friendly inks widely used in China:
Water-based ink
The aqueous ink (Water-based ink) is mainly composed of a water-soluble resin, organic pigments, solvents and additives related composite-lapped. Water-based ink is the ink used in most flexographic packaging and printing at home and abroad . Water-based inks do not contain volatile organic solvents, which not only reduces the residual toxicity of printed products, but also prevents fire due to static electricity and flammable solvents.
2. Ultraviolet (UV) curing ink
The curing process of UV curing ink is a process of photochemical reaction , that is, under the action of ultraviolet energy, the prepolymer is cured into a film in a very short time. In addition to causing the surface of the ink to cure, ultraviolet light can penetrate deep UV light Cures the ink and stimulates further curing of the deep ink film. Compared with traditional inks, the polymerization and drying of UV-curable inks is more thorough, without any evaporation or solvent-based contaminants, and the ink film is 100% cured.
3. Electron beam curing ink (EB ink)
Electron beam curing ink refers to the ink that can quickly change from liquid to solid under the irradiation of high energy electron beam, also known as EB ink. The electron beam curing ink is mainly composed of pigments, linking materials, auxiliary agents, color materials, etc. Electron beam curing uses an electron beam as an energy source for irradiation, and performs a radiation chemical reaction with an active liquid chemical formula to quickly dry and solidify at room temperature .
In the professional food packaging industry , the printing of low migration ink is an important research topic. Continuously improving the printing process to minimize the migration of ink is the guarantee of food packaging printing safety. I believe that in the future, with the national attention and the continuous improvement of people's quality of life, environmentally friendly inks will definitely be used more and more widely.MST packaging CO.,LTD committed to producing environmentally friendly packaging bags that can be recycled and compostable.
