Printers Score with Recycling

Three Midwestern printers—a book component manufacturer, a large-format producer of high-graphic packaging and a high-quality commercial sheetfed shop—are finding productivity and competitive advantage in FloClear, a four-stage, patent-pending recycling system designed to improve on-press fountain solution usage.

The results, the three firms report, include higher overall pressroom throughput, improved color consistency, reduced contamination and hazardous waste disposal costs, less use of paper, ink and fountain solution chemistry—and greatly accelerated return on investment.

One of the earliest field-test users was $38-million Lake County Press (LCP), Waukegan, IL, a 160-employee commercial shop running seven 40″ Heidelberg sheetfeds for high-end color work, about 60% of it stochastic screening, on coated and uncoated stock.

"We were dumping fountain solution weekly so we could start fresh on Mondays," says Dan Murphy, pressroom supervisor. "Once we installed FloClear in mid-2003, we've gone months without having to discard anything." LCP then added a second FloClear system dedicated to its 12-color Speedmaster perfector.

At B.F. Nelson, a Savage, MN, large-format packaging producer, Al Gramont reports on adding a FloClear system last January for two 56″-wide KBA Rapida presses—since followed by another for a new 64″ Rapida.

"Fountain solution conductivity escalated by the hour and required constant adjustment," explains the printing superintendent. "Now, a press operator confirms three times a day that it is staying steady."

Gramont adds that B.F. Nelson, which prints on paperboard, plus D-, E- and F-flute corrugated, thought that the return on the FloClear investment would be six months or more. As things turned out, he estimates ROI at just three months, factoring in elimination of dumping chemistry.

Gramont also credits the recycling system for faster customer OK's.

The third FloClear user, Visual Systems, Inc., Milwaukee, WI, has supplied book components, overhead transparencies and ancillary products to the educational and trade publishing markets for more than 40 years.

The $14-million specialty printer won acclaim as a pioneer in printing inks that cure by ultraviolet light. "We've been applying UV inks and UV coatings since the mid-1980s," says Dean Alger, pressroom technical coordinator, "mainly onto plastics, clear polyesters and synthetic substrates."

"Because the water chemistry at Visual Systems was very unusual," says FloClear developer Roy Seibert, "this was a great field-test site. They just dropped in the new system and began running as usual."

In July, GATF awarded FloClear a 2004 InterTech Technology Award. More information is available at www.floclear.com