Page 34 - FINAT Yearbook 2012

FINAT TECHNICAL SEMINAR REPORT
KEEP EVOLVING, KEEP INNOVATING – THE LABEL INDUSTRY’S AGENDA
Once every two years, the technical community in Europe’s self-adhesive labelling association, FINAT, gets togetherforafocusedupdate. InBarcelonainMarch2012,FINATPresidentKurtWalker,CEOoftesaBandfix AG, welcomed over 170 participants from around the world to an event that truly reflected current advances and innovations, challenges, and opportunities in the industry.
Taking as its uncompromising title ‘Self-adhesive labels and their future vs alternative technologies – evolution or extinction’, the FINAT Technical Seminar addressed topics and issues across the industry’s extremely complex value chain. Sean Duffy, Chairman of the FINAT Seminar Committee and Global Business Manager at Bluestar Silicones, immediately signposted the direction in which that value chain is moving. ‘Evolution has become innovation’, he said; and the agenda that followed demonstrated the truth of that statement.
SELF-ADHESIVE LABELS’ HISTORY
Innovation has been at the heart of the self-adhesive labelling industry since its
inception. Sjaak Elmendorp, Vice President, Global Technology, Labels and Packaging Materials for Avery Dennison set the context with a look back in history, showing how the company’s founder, R Stanton Avery, developed the concept of the self-adhesive label from a simple price label to the globally-accepted product identification and marking technology it has become today. That positioning has been achieved in just 77 years, embracing tremendous advances in the science – including silicone release technology, different adhesive formulations for different substrates and environments, and film-based release liners. Mr Elmendorp ended his keynote with a brief checklist of ‘what’s next?’ requirements: the need for new downstream processes ‘to change cost and performance paradigms’; fully-recyclable laminates; migration-free adhesives; non-zippy release for fast conversion of sticky adhesives; linerless developments; and updated industry test methods.
CURRENT MARKET DATA
‘Evolution is inevitable,’ said Corey Reardon, President and CEO of international label and packaging industry analysts AWA Alexander Watson Associates. Self-adhesive labelling is, he observed, ‘in the mature stage of its lifecycle.’ He explored the current state of the self-adhesive label sector and existing threats and opportunities. Challenges, he said, include continuing high costs of key
Corey Reardon
polymers, adhesives, and chemicals in the coming decade; environmental and sustainability issues; value chain complexity; fragmentation at converter level, creating margin pressures (there are 10,000 label converters worldwide); and alternative label and product decoration technologies.
Many opportunities still exist, however, and Mr Reardon shared preliminary AWA research for 2011 which indicates that the Asia Pacific region – already bigger than North America – is set to take the leading market share in 2012. Variable information print continues to represent a healthy 41% of usage, and primary product labelling 45% (here, growth is today strongest). Both these
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Sjaak Elmendorp
FINAT YEARBOOK 2012 |