Baumer boosts adhesive rates for e-commerce packaging with hot melt system
03 Aug 2021 --- Baumer is unveiling a hot melt system for applying adhesives to cardboard packaging, which it says can achieve needed consistency and quality rates for the booming e-commerce market.
According to Innova Market Insights, home deliveries shot up during the COVID-19 pandemic, with one in three global consumers saying they increased use of food delivery services. Revenues for food delivery also rose by 30 percent worldwide.
The market researcher pegged “Home Delivery Haven” as a top trend for 2021, noting “skyrocketing” demand for grocery and premium F&B home delivery, “presenting new challenges and opportunities for consumer packaging.”
In response to these developments, Baumer is working to improve its production system, simplify operations and increase process reliability. The result, it supports, is a new system unrivaled anywhere on the market in speed and efficiency.
A rise in e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated smoother adhesive systems for packaging, says Baumer.Hot melting tech
Andreas Schneiders, corrugated business development manager at Baumer, explains the demand for and difficulty in creating packaging adhesives.
“These days, systems that apply adhesive strips are expected to deposit perfect, uniform layer thicknesses and accurately cover them with silicone tape, even when dispensing high quantities at high production speeds.”
“The more homogeneous the contact surface, the more reliably and securely the boxes can be sealed. In addition, homogeneous contact surfaces facilitate the work of employees in shipping, who no longer have to manually smooth over the closures to firmly seal them.”
In response, Baumer created the new melt system, which given correct settings and suitable ambient conditions, can achieve adhesive application weights of up to 500 g/m2.
It creates a clean cut-off and minimal tailing to ensure no pressure-sensitive adhesive is smeared onto other packaging areas or drawn into the machine. The new application head also affords users maximum flexibility in selecting pressure-sensitive adhesives as it can process various adhesives with a range of high viscosities.
Enhancing adhesives
Baumer joins a number of developments in the hot melt adhesives market.
This year, Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics expanded its high-performance Affinity GA polyolefin elastomers (POE) with the launch of bio-based Affinity RE. The product reportedly enabled chemical company Henkel’s Technomelt brand to minimize carbon footprint in its new Supra Eco hot melt adhesives range.
Elastomers are special polymers with high elasticity. Affinity RE was one of the first bio-based, high-performance polyolefin elastomers on the market, Dow indicates.
Recently, H.B. Fuller unveiled two new compostable adhesive solutions for flexible packaging under its global Flextra Evolution brand. The new solutions came in response to increasing consumer environmental awareness, stricter legislation on conventional plastics and industry focus on addressing end-of-life issues, such as recyclability and compostability.
Edited
By Louis Gore-Langton
