Screen Printing Ink New Consumables Industry Status and Future Trends

Screen printing has long been the subject of high-contamination hats. The reason for this is not only the washing of screen water, photosensitizers and other screen printing products, but also the pollution caused by screen printing inks. With the development of society, people’s attention to environmental protection has been continuously improved, and the scientific development concept of energy conservation and emission reduction is well-received.

In 2007, the Chinese government introduced a number of policies aimed at strengthening environmental protection that have had a significant impact on ink manufacturers. First, it significantly reduced the tax rebates on pigments, pigment intermediates and other key raw materials. Second, China closed a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises with serious pollution in 2007. Among these enterprises, raw material production enterprises account for a large proportion.

The pollution-free green ink in the screen printing industry is now very popular. As we know the proportion of UV ink is increasing year by year, it is becoming the mainstream product in the market.

The other is the influence of supply and demand. Most ink manufacturers have more or less chosen to import raw materials from China. This series of measures has caused a change in the relationship between supply and demand of ink raw materials, resulting in tighter short-term supply and rising ink prices. This is also a concern for ink manufacturers. A severe test came.

It is also very important that with the linear rise in the price of petroleum products, the cost of ink production will, of course, increase with the rise in oil prices. This will also have a certain impact on the cost of ink production.

Ink manufacturers face cost pressures

Flint Group recently said: In the past few weeks, they have received a lot of notices on the price of raw materials, the specific increase of 5% to 30%, and this is mainly due to China's environmental policy caused. Sun Chemical also pointed out that as the Chinese government has severely cracked down on environmental pollution in recent years, many manufacturers of pigment intermediates, especially those of carbon amines and beta naphthols, have already been affected. influences.

As a result, the ink manufacturer must increase the price of the product to transfer part of the cost to downstream customers. In 2007, ink manufacturers, including Flint Group and Sun Chemicals, could only choose to implement a full price increase for their products due to the enormous pressure of rising raw material costs.

In addition, some ink manufacturers are also looking for new pigment alternatives to offset the increasing production costs. However, finding such alternatives is not easy. There are very few UV inks that use raw materials from renewable sources. Adding a small amount of renewable raw materials does not affect the performance of UV-curable inks. At least until now, manufacturers have not found the ideal alternatives. The main reason is that in addition to technology, the cost issues are even more difficult to solve. Therefore, the rise of ink prices is an inevitable trend in the future for a long time.

Market Status of UV Screen Printing Inks

The United States was one of the first countries to use UV inks for screen printing. The market share of screen printing UV inks in the US market accounted for 60-65% of the total sales of screen printing inks. The average annual growth rate of screen printing UV inks has reached about 4%. In contrast, Europe has also started using silkscreen UV inks very early, but the penetration rate is not as high as in the United States. Currently in Europe, 45-40% of printers use UV inks.

In Asia, solvent-based inks are more than 60% more popular than manufacturers. The main reason is that printing companies in the Asian region mostly pursue low cost and labor and do not pay enough attention to environmental protection. Therefore, UV inks have not reached the usage rate of developed countries in Europe and America so far.

Above, we can see that UV inks have incomparable advantages over traditional inks in all aspects. Since silk screen printing UV inks were developed in the 1970s, they have had a profound influence on the printing industry, which has brought about earth-shaking changes in the entire printing industry. Especially in today's society, which calls for environmental protection and sustainable development, UV inks will certainly occupy more market share in China's silk screen printing ink market.

Future trends: UV screen printing inks have good prospects

According to statistics from the National Association of Printing Ink Manufacturers (NAPIM), the average profitability of ink manufacturers in 2006 was only 1.9%, so the industry needs to strengthen its supply through various channels. Chain and cost control. The rapid increase in the price of ink raw materials caused by product shortages has forced many ink suppliers to abandon the production of traditional inks and turned their attention to other lucrative markets, such as the recent rapid development of UV screen printing inks. The mainstream of development.

UV inks are inks composed of oligomers, monomers, pigments, photoinitiators, and various additives. Most UV inks currently used are based on the radiation-free cure of acrylate prepolymers.

Today, UV screen inks can be used to produce a variety of prints, such as posters, containers, CDs, metals, body hull advertising, and various industrial products. According to the different requirements of various markets for the image's outdoor durability, chemical resistance, cold/heat resistance, waterproofness, and flexibility, major ink manufacturers have designed and produced various types of UV inks.

Most of today's ink manufacturers agree that UV inks have stronger advantages over traditional solvent-based inks in terms of environmental protection, health, and safety:

1, it does not contain heavy metals, VOC emissions and harmful solvent evaporation is low.

2. It is not necessary to use too much irritating cleaning agent in the process of cleaning and recycling of printing and net cloth, which greatly reduces the amount of irritant cleaning agent used in the process of printing and screen cleaning.

3. The curing efficiency of the ink is higher than that of general ink. Compared with the solvent-based and water-based ink dryers, the UV dryer consumes much less energy and avoids the possibility of contamination of NVP or V-Pyrol. The use of additives.