Large size, high quality

Over 400 packaging experts from 25 countries took part in a recent Technology Forum on industrial scale high quality folding carton production, at the Nampak Group's printing plant in Hoogerheide, The Netherlands. MAN Roland, Bobst, PrinTech Systems and CSI were event partners.

The South African based Nampak packaging group has 155 production facilities in 18 countries, employing around 17,500 people, and has annual sales of some e2.3B. Nearly half of this turnover comes from carton work. Nampak Carton in Europe (NCE) has five factories in the UK, Belgium and Holland, where 170,000t of cartonboard is processed every year for annual sales of €250M. With the two production facilities at Hoogerheide and Londerzeel, it claims fifth place among Europe's leading folding carton producers. The packaging produced in these two plants is almost exclusively for food and major brand products, 70 per cent of it being exported.

Nampak's philosophy is to keep overall process costs as low as possible while maintaining the highest printing quality. Using FMsix screen and colour technology developed and patented by subsidiary company PrinTech Systems, all jobs are separated according to pictures and vector elements, and only FM screens are used. To avoid a multitude of spot colours, company logos or type lines and solids in house colours are developed from six colours - generally with four process colours plus FMsix orange and blue.

This enables Nampak to reproduce 90 per cent of the spot colours it needs; only the remaining 10 per cent require the combination orange and green. It says this saves both the costs of additional printing units and ink changes, and expensive warehousing of inks for spot colours. Using FMsix has reduced the inventory of spot colour inks from 500 to just over 100.

Seventy-five per cent of all jobs are produced by this highly standardized six colour process - and gang formes are put together for the appropriate colour combinations. This permits ink to be supplied in an operator friendly manner from large containers by pipelines directly to the ink fountains, and always in the colour sequence B, C, M, Y. Any spot colours needed are filled into the ink fountains manually.

The latest large format press in Hoogerheide, installed earlier this year, is a six colour Roland 900 with a coating module. It is equipped with PPL (Power Plate Loading) for automated one minute plate changing; automatic devices for simultaneous washing of blanket and impression cylinders; ink repellent fountains for fast ink change-over; automatic non stop equipment at feeder and delivery; and the AUPASYS automatic pallet transport system, which enables piles to be changed fully automatically at a press speed of 14,000 sheets/hour.

With the Roland 900, Nampak is a pilot user of the InlineInspector in format 6. This in-line sheet quality control system from the Roland 700 is being used for the first time in production conditions with a sheet width of up to 1,400mm.

The visitors to Hoogerheide were also shown the factory's efficient interplay of filmless prepress, large format printing with in-line enhancement, large format die cutting and stripping on Bobst equipment, folding carton gluing and packing also on Bobst equipment, right through to automated palletizing of the shipping cartons by a CSI robotic system.

The accompanying symposium focused particularly on the topics of economics of large format production, in-line enhancement with different coating systems, and trends in the European folding carton industry. Mark Collet, the manager responsible for the Nampak activities in Europe and a member of the executive board of the European Carton Manufacturers Association, sees a growing demand for folding carton packaging worldwide. As challenges for the printing and finishing process he named further increases in machine speeds, shorter overall makeready times and run lengths, and short delivery cycles.