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Litoplas began creating packaging over 50 years ago, and now employs a 500-strong team, with a new production site about to open as it increases its flexible packaging printing capacity, primarily for the food industry.

To help work towards finding better solutions for flexible packaging recycling, Litoplas created the recycling business Polyrec and is currently recycling an equivalent weight of plastic to 50-60% of the material the business prints.

Luis Mora is Chief Customer Officer at Litoplas, overseeing Sales & Marketing.

鈥淔rom our customers, in the short term we hear a lot about productivity,鈥� says Mora. 鈥淚nflation is an issue and brands are trying to absorb those rising costs in flexo printing tech, to be more productive in order not to pass all of this inflation on to the end customer.鈥�

鈥淲e鈥檙e working on total cost of ownership to deliver value; there鈥檚 no magic formula for a better price overnight. We need to provide value year by year鈥�

Longer-term, Mora says companies are looking to become more sustainable but are trying to save on costs or at least be cost neutral in the process. However, this is challenging with the current technology and infrastructure.

鈥淲e鈥檝e always had to create process innovation to stay productive,鈥� says Mora. Referring to the introduction of Extended Color Gamut (ECG) at Litoplas over five years ago, Mora says strict statistical process control was necessary to make ECG a productive process.

鈥淲e don鈥檛 offer ECG without a Delta E color control quality certificate,鈥� he explains. 鈥淲e can鈥檛 print with ECG with subjective color criteria. We can鈥檛 have a customer saying on the third job the red isn鈥檛 bright enough or we need a lower blue. We work that out in a service level agreement to build trust in the long term.鈥�

Mora adds that a long-term relationship is important for ECG to deliver productivity gains, as over time the initial investment in ECG equipment and setup can be recouped.

鈥淲e鈥檙e working on total cost of ownership to deliver value; there鈥檚 no magic formula for a better price overnight. We need to provide value year by year,鈥� he explains.

As inflation looms, targeting higher levels of sustainability on substrates can be challenging. In a project known as Stage 6, Litoplas has worked with one of its suppliers to develop flexible packaging printing on a substrate that can be efficiently recycled, giving productivity gains to the recycler.

鈥淥ften a recycler can鈥檛 sell material for a good enough price compared to the costs to recycle it,鈥� says Mora. 鈥淥ur recycler told us that eliminating adhesive and reducing ink would give a big boost to their productivity. So we鈥檝e made what we call an adaptive leap in Stage 6 to eliminate adhesive and reduce ink by 50-60%. We鈥檝e made some launches and our customers and recyclers are very happy with this so it鈥檚 something we鈥檙e scaling up.鈥�