Siegwerk, one of the leading global providers of printing inks and coatings for packaging applications and labels, has announced that its packaging ink series UniNATURE has won Packaging Europe’s Sustainability Awards 2022. The sustainable ink solution with a high Bio-Renewable Content was not only selected as the winner in the category ‘Renewable Materials’ but also as the ‘Most Sustainable Innovation’ among all 360 entries from across the global packaging value chain. All winners of the commercialized innovations and initiatives categories of the Sustainability Awards 2022 were revealed on 13 September 2022, at the Sustainable Packaging Summit, in Lisbon, Portugal.
“It is such an honor to be recognized as a two-time winner at this year’s Sustainability Awards,” says Christopher van Laack, vice president, business units paper & board EMEA and liquid food packaging at Siegwerk. “Being selected as a winner in the category ‘Renewable Materials’ is already a great success for our UniNATURE series but being awarded the ‘Most Sustainable Innovation’ at the same time is a remarkable triumph for us that shows once again that we are on the right track to significantly drive the development of sustainable packaging.”
Siegwerk always invests a lot of time to bring forward-looking solutions to life that enable the design of circular packaging solutions. From R&D through raw material sourcing and industrialization to application technology and sales, there are many teams involved in successfully rolling out a new series to the market.
UniNATURE is Siegwerk’s sustainable water-based ink range for paper and board applications that is formulated with natural components and thus partly replaces fossil carbon with biorenewable carbon, concretely contributing to defossilization in the sense of a circular economy. The ink range was one of four finalists nominated in the category ‘Renewable Materials.’
UniNATURE incorporates up to 50% renewable carbon content which is up to nine times more compared to standard water-based inks and thus provides an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional inks without impacting the recyclability of paper and board packaging while contributing to reducing microplastics in inks. A combination of natural and conventional resins, from bio-sourced monomers, allows customers to quickly change to UniNATURE as no adjustments to the existing processes, such as speed and color matching, are required.
Furthermore, the sustainable ink range comes along with excellent ink performance and color strengths offering similar levels of resistance as current water-based technologies. It offers improved ink stability and lower VOC content while also enabling high printing speeds on both coated and uncoated papers. UniNATURE is applicable for many paper & board applications including corrugated board boxes, trays and displays, fast food packaging, sacks and bags, as well as cups and wraps. It supports various printing applications whilst meeting the highest market and regulatory standards.
The Sustainability Awards is an international competition for sustainability in packaging annually awarded by the Packaging Europe magazine. The mission of the award is to illuminate the most important sustainable innovation across the packaging value chain. Therefore, winners are selected by an independent expert jury representing a cross-section of the international packaging value chain, including leading brand owners and retailers, sustainability organizations, waste management, academia and industry experts.
This year’s competition covered awards in twelve different categories – seven for commercialized products and initiatives, including e.g. Best Practice, Recyclable Packaging or Renewable Materials, as well as five new pre-commercialized categories dedicated to showcasing emerging innovations that will hit the market during the next years. The winners of the pre-commercialized categories will be announced later in November. Here, Siegwerk is also nominated in the category ‘Driving the Circular Economy’ for the polycirQ deinking process for printed plastic films, which helps to prevent downcycling of valuable plastic resources.
