PROTECTING The Environment Shades of green
- signmaking materials and the environment
In the big scheme of things, we, our species that is, has been notionally in charge of the planet for a relatively short period of time. In that time though, we’ve taken from it without much thought for the fact that its resources are anything but never-ending. Recently, that news has caught up with us and we, again our species or at least some of it, are on a crusade to put matters to rights. Needless to say within an interest group that includes every
man, woman and child on the planet, opinions are going to differ as to the right approach. Some take a shun-the-wheel hardline route that wants to drive us back to a stone-age existence. Others don’t care at all. Right down the middle though, is the furrow ploughed by the reasonable man. His way sees us living modern, comfortable lives but making sensible economies where we can. He represents a huge slice of the population who, in all doing a little, are contributing a lot.
You make signs for a living. That means you buy things that
probably have to be transported to your place of work having first been manufactured somewhere else. Among the products you buy, there may be a Metamark box or two containing the materials you need to make your wares. The materials will probably be a plastic of some flavour or other. How does that square with your view of the way the world needs to operate now and in the future? According to The Materials Company, Metamark, it should
square quite comfortably. PVC, one of signmaking’s most enduring and popular staples, is a much improved industrial plastic that cleaned up its act years before the season’s colour became green. Propelled by some of the world’s brightest chemists and some of the world’s most accomplished corporations, vinyl, as we know it, has become a respectable citizen of the times in which we live. Vinyl is very often recycled into useful second-life products
rather than consigned to landfill sites. Much of what isn’t actually recycled is cleanly incinerated and the energy that sits latent within it is then put to good and productive uses. From Metamark’s perspective, vinyl is a raw material. Before the vinyl Metamark admits to its manufacturing process can be of any use to a signmaker, it has to be coated with an adhesive, a carrier or liner paper has to be applied, it has to be wound, trimmed slit to width cut to length and boxed. Metamark sees its job as doing all these things efficiently and yet still being able to deliver a product that outperforms the need to which it’s most often applied. According to Metamark’s production people, efficient
manufacturing has an alter-ego - it’s major investment. Outdated production plant simply would not deliver the aggressive goals mandated by Metamark’s environmental policy or driven by its culture. For these reasons and others, Metamark’s plant is for the most part bespoke, and it all reflects the state-of-the-art. A major element of vinyl manufacturing is the stage
where the adhesive is coated upon the products face film. The process actually confounds intuition because the liquid adhesive is first coated upon the liner that will eventually sit on the back of the product. Once the adhesive is coated on the liner, the coated liner moves from the coating head and into a long chamber where substantially all of the liquid is removed leaving just evenly distributed and dissolved adhesive solids behind. The liquid leaves the adhesive in the form of a vapour.
Metamark’s process actually claims the latent energy from the emitted vapour to create heat and this heat can then in turn be applied to power other parts of the process. The coated liner and the face film, be it digital or coloured, are next bought into contact and squeezed together through a succession of rollers with carefully managed nip pressure. The whole, mill-length roll is next removed using a crane and taken to the point of conversion in the factory. Conversion is a process that unavoidably generates
Metamark’s plant is state-of-the-art and for the most part bespoke in order to achieve the company’s environmental goals.
52 Sign Update ISSUE 130 JULY/AUGUST 2011
waste. This is because the roll edges have to be cut off so as to present clean, properly coated edges to the rolls that are ultimately sold. Metamark’s efficiency as an industrial coater, its raw materials admissions processes and its diligence during manufacturing mean that waste material is typically less than five percent of all output. Such waste as is produced is consigned to recycling initiative and anything that’s useful in terms of its being able to work,
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