Europe

The Domino label press, its first foray into printing presses, is in the field with the company expecting a flood of orders over the next year DOMINO PRINTING SCIENCES HAS produced a 5% increase in sales for 2011 to £314.1 million, the 33rd year of growth for the Cambridge business. Pretax profits also rose to £57.4 million, up 10%. The company found it tough going in North America and parts of Europe, the UK and Germany excepted, but noted good growth in the developing markets in central Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The company has increased its staff

Currently there is not a good enough infrastructure in place to get optimum benefit from biodegradable packaging, even if it is widely available. Europe leads regulatory reform, with the US trailing behind. Asia and Australia are making headway, but Asia (and in particular China) suffer from a confused approach. Consumers are driving demand, with major retailers including Coca-cola and Walmart getting on board. However, despite increased demand, the key cost barriers for suppliers are R&D costs, production costs, and economies of scale. PLA dominates bioplastics use, but new materials are being developed from algae and microbacterial sources and advances

The latest FESPA Economy Survey has revealed that 70% of respondents are looking to diversify their business to improve business growth. The top areas in which print service providers (PSPs) plan to develop into are interiors (17.4%), label printing (16.67%) and signage (15.53%). Over half believe that the market has not fully recovered (52.44%) but the outlook of printers remains optimistic despite the challenging environment, with three quarters of respondents believing that the market will grow in 2012, with an average expected growth of 14.5% across the year for their business. Reflecting on 2011 end of year sales, 20.4%

The SCA group’s German arm, SCA Packaging Deutschland, fired up a Rapida 162a at its Hanau offset plant in May this year. The six-colour coater press with extensive automation and packaging printing capability is the third large-format press and the second of this type in Hanau, where the main products are offset-laminated packaging and displays, some for other group operations. The 35m Rapida 162a with board-handling capability at SCA Packaging + Display in Hanau is one of the most advanced and comprehensively equipped sheetfed offset press lines for packaging and displays in operation SCA has around 45,000 employees worldwide,

Latest News A new report on the analysis of official EU data on packaging shows that over the past 11 years the amount of packaging waste going to final disposal in EU-15 has fallen by 43%. Higher recycling levels and other forms of packaging waste recovery are largely the reasons says EUROPEN, the European Organization for Packaging and the Environment. In 2008 in the EU 27 member states just over 17 million tonnes of packaging were sent for final disposal. To put this into context, it is estimated that 89 million tonnes of food are currently wasted in the

DALLAS—Nov. 2, 2011—KBA North America announces that its latest corporate report includes informative articles on three of its successful U.S. print customers. These “real-world” stories capture the advanced technology, the thriving expansion, and the strong partnership forged with KBA. Expansion is the key theme of the article on Motivating Graphics, a global printing company based in Fort Worth, TX. This customer purchased a new Rapida 162 64˝ six-color press, making it the third KBA press for the large sheetfed and web firm that provides packaging and printing for the high-tech telecommunications market in North America, South America, Central America,