Printing direct to cans is happening – slowly

Options for digitally printing cans and other cylindrical or conical objects are increasing, though none has yet achieved the sort of break through that challenges conventional methods of printing, whether dry offset or the application of a shrink sleeve, wet glue or pressure sensitive label. 

When cylindrical objects range from promotional items like drinks bottles to Coca-Cola cans, from aerosols to disposable coffee cups, this is perhaps surprising. But the surfaces are not always amenable to inks and the existing market is geared towards volumes not customised production. 

The alternative methods of direct to can printing for those needing shorter runs, artisan brewers for example or start ups creating niche energy drinks, have been shrink sleeves. These customers are frequently sensitive to customer demand that ranks sustainability highly and do not want packaging using two distinct materials – aluminium and plastic film – which make recycling difficult. And even for artisan brewers a short run can mean several thousand cans.

That is still too few for a conventional decorating process to cope with given the lengthy makeready times and high speed of operation. What the market requires is a print technology which does not penalise short runs and does not result in high operating costs. Technology that runs a few hundred cans an hour will have limited appeal. Even so the technology exists and is being adopted. North American group Ardagh has a number of sites which are being equipped with Hinterkopf direct to shape inkjet printers. There are models that run from 120 cans a minute to 480 a minute. It is making slow progress with 18 machines installed globally at the start of this year. The flagship machine is a seven-colour printer where the first customer will be producing cosmetics packaging.

Inkcups targets the promotional gifting market with inkjet printer that use a helix principle to print while the target object rotates beneath the inkjet heads. This is a similar customer base to that for its pad printing machines. Target customers have been in the promotional print sector, hence participation at Fespa and appointment of former Agfa UK sales manager Bobby Grauf as head of sales for Europe. 

The fastest machine achieves 600 items an hour and targets the stadium cups market, printing match day details on beer and soft drinks cups as a memento for fans attending the specific event.

Another German supplier is Dekron, formed to bring Krone’s direct to shape technology to market. Krone’s had worked with Xaar on a digital print project for a Belgian brewery and has more recently worked on a project for Beck’s beer. It offers a printer for concept testing and development, and for different levels of product to several thousands per hour. However, it currently prints only on glass or plastic bottles, HDPE or PET, not aluminium cans.

British company Tonejet has the can market in its sights with Cyclone, a 500 cans an hour machine that uses Tonejet’s unique technology, part inkjet, part electrostatic printer. This overcomes some of the viscosity issues when printing with inkjet by enabling a latent electrostatic image to pull the high viscosity ink from ejectors by means of the charge attracting the fluid much as dry power toner adheres to a latent image on the surface of a receptive imaging drum.

The first was installed 15 months ago at Bevcraft in Peterborough, which intended it for artisan brewers. 

The Cyclone is suited to production runs from 1-50,000, with a top of the range system including full automation from unloading the containers from a pallet, through inspection, cleaning, over varnishing, baking and repalletising the 440ml or 500ml cans.