How Invert Trim Waste boosts sustainability while cutting solvent costs
You could be missing out on a simple way to improve your platemaking sustainability – and cut your solvent costs – with a longstanding, in-built feature of the FLEXCEL NX System. Easy to set up through FLEXCEL NX Central Software and TIFF Assembler Plus (TAP), Invert Trim Waste has been used successfully for over 10 years to prevent unused plate material from being washed away during platemaking, reducing waste and generating significant solvent savings. Director of Advanced Print Applications, Dr. John Anderson, describes how it works and outlines the environmental gains and level of savings available.
More sustainable platemaking that saves you money
You may not realize it, but you could be missing out on a simple way to improve your platemaking sustainability and cut your costs. Invert Trim Waste (ITW) is a built-in feature of your FLEXCEL NX System that has been benefiting users for over 10 years. ITW is accessed through FLEXCEL NX Central software and TIFF Assembler Plus (TAP) – ready to be put into action to reduce waste in the platemaking process and deliver savings on high-cost solvent.
How ITW works
When enabled, ITW starts at a distance from the imaged areas and is structured to allow solvent to flow, rather than trapping excess solvent. You specify a border value, determining how close the ITW pattern gets to the customer files. ITW then automatically fills unused portions of a plate layout file with an engineered exposure pattern. This avoids areas of raw plate (not taken up by customer files) being identified as the waste area where photopolymer is washed away. With ITW, during plate exposure, the photopolymer in waste areas is crosslinked and isn’t washed away – saving solvent.
That’s because 85-90% of solvent can be reclaimed and returned to its optimal processing state through the use of plate washout solvent and distillation. Using ITW, more solvent is reclaimed in this way, creating significant savings – given the high cost of solvent – and sustainability gains through waste reduction.
ITW disabled and enabled
Simple setup
The ITW feature is configurable by layout setup, so it’s easy to try on a limited number of jobs to see how it works within your platemaking operation. In fact, we recommend, as with all new system changes, applying ITW to one or two sheets and checking if there are any issues in platemaking before implementing it across more plates, especially with automatic cutting systems.
Once tested – to confirm there are no issues – it can be implemented across all platemaking, reducing waste and saving on costs straight away.
In TAP, ITW located within the Layout Setup. In FLEXCEL NX Central Software, ITW is located within Output Setup.
Left: Traditional layout. Center: Output with ITW disabled. Right: Output with ITW enabled TAP v4.0.
Platemaking that’s better for the environment
In wide web flexible packaging, 25-35% of the sheet can be unused after imaging. And the same is true with the smaller sheet plates in narrow web printing. Efficient platemaking, mixing wide web in the middle and narrow web around the outside, can reduce the unused plate areas to 8-12%.
Any unused plate area though has zero economic value to the platemaker, it’s just waste. And as it is a non-image area, it gets washed out to the floor, using more solvent than is needed and leading to more dissolved photopolymer. Imaging these unused plate areas with ITW reduces the area that’s dissolved and washed away, cutting down on your platemaking waste and overall solvent usage.
The bottom-line impact
Around four gallons of solvent are used to wash out each m2 of thin photopolymer plates. Meaning, one million m2 of photopolymer plates can require up to four million gallons of solvent.
By imaging 2/3 of the unused image area, solvent usage in platemaking can be cut by 10-20%.
That could lead to solvent usage per plate reducing from four gallons to 3.2-3.6 gallons. Let’s take a midpoint of 3.4 million gallons per m2 of photopolymer plate. That means, for every one million m2 of photopolymer, 3.4 million – rather than 4 million – gallons of solvent are needed. This potentially means a saving of 600,000 gallons of recycled solvent and the associated energy used in recycling. ITW also saves on related costs such as recycling, transportation and labor.
At a single site, the ITW feature can save roughly 20% of solvent consumption, creating savings of $1.75 per m2 of plate material washed out, based on 2020 pricing. At a site using three thousand m2 of plates per year, platemaking can be better for the environment while saving over $5000 annually.
The ITW feature reduces costs, is environmentally responsible and easy to implement; many FLEXCEL NX System users have been reaping the benefits of ITW for years. Why not enable ITW on all your FLEXCEL NX Systems today?
John says:
“Despite this established usage in plate rooms, 80% of FLEXCEL NX Plates are being made without ITW activated, resulting in increased solvent and energy use, and more virgin solvents added to process these plates.”