host posted on May 05, 2008 19:34
The plain brown box isn’t what it used to be! Today, corrugated boxes are used to sell the products they protect. In some instances, the box costs more than the product. The complex natures of the printing and laminating operations necessary to produce these “pretty boxes” have added significantly to the cost of production. Slitter dust, chaff from sheeting, and other environmental contaminants on the surface of the material make it impossible to achieve production goals, and difficult to maintain quality print standards set by the customer. The difference between profit and loss, on critical jobs especially, rests with how clean the material is during the production process.
Surface dust is the enemy of any printing operation. The resulting hickeys, line voids, and other imperfections can render even a single color job unacceptable, not to mention the problems in multi-color print jobs. How often have you run a highcoverage job on a high-holdout material and had to stop every few hundred sheets to clean the plate? This is because the production process that produces the corrugate generates the surface contam-ination. This production may occur in another part of your facility or it may come from an outside vendor. In either case, the producers are less sensitive to cleanliness since they don’t have to do the printing.
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