As the achievement of the SDGs is increasingly recognized as a common goal for society, “environmental friendliness” is becoming a standard as well as added value, and its importance is increasing.
From an early stage, the SAKATA INX Group has been working on the development and promotion of environmentally-friendly products, and has worked on environmental improvement and on raising awareness in the printing industry.
As we work on promoting our environmentally-friendly products, one product we are putting particular effort into is BOTANICAL INK.
Printed matter that uses BOTANICAL INK is able to show the unique SAKATA INX environmental mark, the “BOTANICAL INK mark”.*
The SAKATA INX Group established an environment division in 1973 in order to address environmental issues, and has since worked on the development of a range of environmentally-friendly products, such as plant-derived ink that uses soy oil.
Generally, the main types of environmentally-friendly ink replace the solvents to disperse the components in the ink with environmentally-friendly components (plant-derived oil, toluene-free, etc.), and for over 30 years, SAKATA INX has developed and marketed a range of inks for packaging and information media that replace the solvent with environmentally-friendly components.
And then in 2016, as a completely new concept, we focused on the solid components of ink that is used to coat printed matter and switched some of them to plant-derived materials. First working on gravure inks for film packaging, we started rolling these inks out under a new SAKATA INX brand called BOTANICAL INK. We have also increased the number of such inks to include flexographic ink for paper packages and corrugated board, sheet-fed offset ink that is used for pamphlets and other such things, and UV inkjet inks for industry.
As marine pollution from waste plastics and microplastics become a major social issue, there is a trend towards using biomass in plastic products as a measure against this. BOTANICAL INK is characterized by the fact that the materials used to make it are strictly biomass-derived, and furthermore, plant-derived.
BOTANICAL INK is an original brand that SAKATA INX promotes, and its technical definition is that the ink solids content must contain at least 10% plant-derived ingredients. Botanical, meaning “of plants”, was adopted as the name of the product, which uses trees, seeds and other such plant-derived materials for its components.
As the SDGs set out by the United Nations in 2015 began to spread as a common goal for society and consumer awareness of them gradually increased, they became a major trend and the variety of products promoting environmental friendliness has increased.
In addition to using environmentally-friendly materials, SAKATA INX BOTANICAL INK also has the appeal of having the word botanical in its brand name, and it has been adopted for use in convenience store private brand products. This has led to an increase in its adoption by major manufacturers for food packaging and hygiene products, paper cups and wrappers for fast food chains, paper bags for take-out, and other such products.
The sales ratio of the BOTANICAL INK series for film packaging in Japan has increased to nearly 60%. In addition to printing companies and converters, it is also gaining increasing recognition among brand owners and consumers. Going forward, SAKATA INX will continue to expand sales in Japan with a focus on packaging inks, and strengthen our BOTANICAL INK business overseas in response to growing environmental awareness in Europe, North America, and Asia, as well as targeting Japanese companies creating a local presence in different countries and brand owners who are growing their business worldwide.
At the same time, we are developing inks with higher botanical content (ratio of plant-derived components) to improve their environmental performance, and we will continue to refine these inks as the linchpin of our sustainable products.