Mike Fairley

FINAT, the international association for self-adhesive label industry, announced it has been undertaking preliminary initiatives for standardization of testing methods for digital printing.

THE HAGUE, The Netherlands—This past month, the biennial FINAT (www.finat.com) technical seminar drew nearly 200 participants to Barcelona to debate current technology-based opportunities and issues in the printing industry.

Over the past five years or so, the digital printing of labels has undoubtedly become a mainstream printing process, with examples of high quality printing being produced daily for the food, beverage, health and beauty, pharmaceutical, consumer products, industrial, and other labeling sectors.

Times are tough; there’s no doubt about it. Costs are rising, competition is fierce, and the economy is in a tail spin (or nose dive, depending on your perspective) but heading down just the same. “This was a difficult year for the [tag and label] business due not only to macro economic issues including high energy costs and continuing high raw material inflation, but also because of growing competition to labels and tags in the packaging industry itself,” notes Corey Reardon, president and CEO of AWA Alexander Watson Associates. The rising costs of materials—across the board—are at the top of most printers’ lists of

BRUSSELS, Belgium—A panel of label industry experts has reviewed the votes for the Label Industry Global Awards and announced the winner of the R. Stanton Avery Lifetime Achievement category. Andrew Jack from Dow Corning was selected as the overall winner by the international label industry judging panel at the FINAT World Congress in Berlin following a review of the online votes against the Awards criteria. This prestigious Award category is sponsored by Avery Dennison in the year which marks the 100th year since the birth of Stan Avery. Andrew Jack has a career spanning over thirty-five years in the silicone industry, firstly with Midland

With less than four weeks to go before one of the industry events of the year, thousands of people have already confirmed their attendance at Labelexpo Americas 2006. And here’s some reasons why: 1. The exhibition More than 450 exhibitors will display the latest machinery and materials, everything from multi-substrate presses to digital presses; laser diecutting to RFID and intelligent labels; in-line decoration systems to multi-process ink systems; VIP substrates to high-technology label films, sleeves and wraps. 2. The conference Knowledge is key. This is the reason why more than 700 places have already been booked for the Labelexpo Americas 2006 TLMI Conference, running