"This year, only a handful of companies have managed to stand out from the crowd. These are the nominees and the winner of the award. The Hermes Award stands for what's essentially the core purpose of the Hannover Messe: to set trends for technical innovations," stated Dr. Jochen Köckler, member of the board for Deutsche Messe AG.
The Hermes Award for technology will be presented by Deutsche Messe AG for the eleventh time at the 2014 Hannover Messe trade show.
KHS is one of the world's leading manufacturers of filling and packaging equipment for the beverage, food and non-food industries, and is part of the Salzgitter Group.
KHS is in line for a Hermes Award for its newly introduced Innoprint technology, which allows PET bottles to be directly printed all round, achieving both cost savings and environmental benefits. Compared to the plastic or paper labels commonly used to dress bottles to date, this process is much more flexible, and neither glue nor labels are needed (42 tons of labelling material are used per annum in a standard labelling process). These no longer have to be shipped or stored in air-conditioned warehouses and CO2 emissions are significantly reduced.
KHS Innoprint needs just text and graphics files, which it very quickly prepares for printing. In theory, the machine is thus able to print each and every PET bottle with a different motif – at a rate of up to 36,000 bottles per hour. Digital printing considerably shortens time-to-market intervals. In fact, containers decorated with new motifs can reach various markets throughout the world in record time - and also at the same time.
The KHS Innoprint uses inks which are suitable for food use. Their low viscosity and the use of intermediate UV curing also enable motifs to dry quickly so that the ink adheres perfectly to the PET bottles. Recesses in or projections on the bottles can also be printed on. The print quality is excellent: an optical resolution of 1,080 x 1,080 dpi produces brilliant colour images. The standard KHS Innoprint has five colour carousels which apply white, cyan, magenta, yellow and black to the bottles in succession according to the CMYK colour model.
The hardened inks can be completely removed from the shredded PET to enable bottle-to-bottle recycling. The company expects that within the next five years around 5% of all PET beverage containers the world over will be printed on instead of labelled.
The KHS Innoprint system will be presented at Hannover Messse 2014 in the Research & Technology section in Hall 2, with the four other products nominated for this year's Hermes Award. KHS will also display Innoprint at the Salzgitter AG booth, number F02 in Hall 6.
