Mercian Labels - business, open source & security label printing

Since early 2006 we at Mercian Labels have been conducting extended experiments on the effects of daylight on self adhesive labels printed using a variety of label printing methods, and we have regularly updated the results of these experiments on a dedicated webpage.

This can be a serious problem in our industry, as labels are often used for warnings and often exposed to daylight for extended periods.  The fact that UV energy in daylight causes fading in many printed media is well accepted, but beyond rumour and “conventional wisdom”, I’ve never actually seen any hard evidence that shows how different types of inks and printing techniques perform when faced with extended periods of exposure to daylight.

We have had experiments going since early 2006  and early 2008 on the following printing ink technologies:

• flexography - solvent based ink - dye based
• flexography - water based ink - pigmented
• letterpress - UV cured ink
• hotfoil - heat and pressure cured ink
• thermal transfer - wax resin based foil image
• Electrostatic toner based technology (v3) from Xeikon (Punch Graphix) from a Xeikon 330
• Digital offset technology from HP (Indigo) from a HP WS 4xxx press
• Electrostatic toner based technology from QuickLabel VIVO!
• UV cured inkjet imagery from Konica Minolta
• Electrostatic toner based technology from Degrava
• Inkjet images from Nilpeter using their Caslon technology with Xaar inkjet heads
• Inkjet images from Xaar using their own inkjet heads (unknown ink)

To give you an idea of what happens when labels fade badly, this is how much a label can fade if its made using inappropriate techniques for its end use application.

This image shows the difference between 2 halves of 4 different labels before and after 2.5 years of daylight exposure behind a south facing glass window.  The top 2 labels were printed with solvent based flexographic inks in a cream colour and a blue colour, and as you can see, the colour has faded to being almost no existent.  Areas with a clear lamination have given no protection to UV rays.

The middle red FRAGILE label was printed with water based flexo inks, and has noticeably faded but is still very clear.  The bottom barcode labels have hardly faded, although the lamination has yellowed.

Looking at a totally different technology, UV cured letterpress inks also fade quite noticeably, especially the lighter colours (yellow being particularly poor)

Best of all, hotfoil printed labels have shown almost no difference, apart from a colour change on the metallic blue foil on the middle gold label.

Looking at digital ink technology, our current test has been running for over 6 months, and there is hardly any changes in any of the many different ink technologies we have been trying.  See the detailed results here.

These (above) are from a Xeikon 330 digital label press.

and these (above) are from a HP Indigo digital label press

and (above) from a Vivo (above top), a Konica Minolta UV inkjet (above middle), and a Degrava (above right bottom “castelhino”)

And the final ones above are from the Xaar printhead used on a Nilpeter Caslon machine and from Xaar themselves.

Conclusions

I guess these observations and opinions will be of serious interest to those involved in specifying labels, and will probably destroy a few myths:

1. UV cured ink technology is not resistant to UV light!
2. solvent based inks have been a mainstay of the industry for decades, and whilst they are easy to use, they fade easily and have limited long term performance.  In line with our Corporate Social Responsibility policy, we at Mercian Labels do not routinely use solvent based inks on any of our labels any more.
3. cheap and simple thermal transfer labels are very resistant to UV, probably due to the high carbon content in the ribbon
4. All the established and emerging digital label printing technologies have a good resistance to UV (so far), but one will emerge as the winner, so watch this space!

I would positively welcome comments from customers, label users, suppliers, manufactuers or others in the industry on this subject - are the results of this experiment what you would expect?  Would anyone wish to predict which if the digital label technologies will do best?

Today I thought I’d blog about one of the most annoying problems I’ve had since migrating to linux at home.  FYI I only use an 8.04 HP Ubuntu laptop and have a spare dell ubuntu laptop at home for general domestic use.

I back up all my files (tens of GB) whenever I can , and when I was a windows user I used a removable USB hard drive.  Since migrating to linux, this has proved almost useless as its NTFS not EXT3 or similar, and it sometimes mounts, then demounts without warning.  And it wont work with USB2, only a USB1.1 hub which makes it really slow.

So, what I’ve decided to do is to have an old desktop running as a server with a 160GB hard drive in it, and use ethernet to access it.  Once I finally get all the data off the USB drive, I’ll retire it.

I’ve also found that USB memory sticks (and an iplayer MP3 player) work with my dell 8.04 laptop, but not myHP 8.04 laptop.

Perhaps someone could tell me (and the world) why windows can mount and demount drives via usb automatically as you plug them in and out multiple times, but linux dosnt have this function?  This is a really annoying functionality drawback that does frustrate people when they are used to windows USB handling.

We’ve renewed our new support contract with Jake and his team over at Senokian today.  Its been a very easy decision, as we need the support and they are very good at open source software support in a business environment. They come recommended by Mercian Labels!

Thanks Dave etc over in Coventry for your ongoing support.

I am about 6 days late in posting this, but I am exceptionally proud to say that we completed the major piece of work in our migration on Wednesday last week when we went live with our new php/postregsql MIS system. I am very pleased with it, as FINALLY we are not dependent on MS to run our core business management information system.

Top give you some idea of this achievement for us…

• We started it in Feb 2007, and estimated completion by July 2007…
• Its taken a MSc qualified software engineer the best of of 18 months of time to write the PHP and javascript code, test and debug (whilst running other projects and helpdesk type support as well)
• I would estimate that its cost us over £15,000 in internal costs to migrate to open source (dont let anyone tell you that open source is “free”, as its certainly not, but it is OURS now, and we dont have long term licensing issues to pay to replace and run the old system.
• Its a better system, although we all have a lot of familiarisation to get used to it, and have a list of minor enhancements as long as your arm that Rich is crunching through.

It is a great relief to finally switch off our old system and not be dependant on it any more, as it was abaout to die any week now, causing us major inconvenience.

Lots more to do, but its great to say we’ve broken the back of the migration!

Next step - migration of our file store to our linux server, then the phone system to trixbox, then finally all the desktops to ubuntu.

Thanks to Rich for all his hard work and making this a success!

I’m far behind others in blogging on the US court decision yesterday on the applicability of open source ( creative commons ) licenses, as reported by the BBC.

However, it may be obvious once you think about it, but I didnt actually recognise that if you breech the exact terms of an open source license, then you are in fact breeching copyright.  In extreme cases, this could be pretty serious.

The article also made it onto the BBC new homepage which I was pleased to see - yet another flag waving exercise for the FOSS community!

Last night, after 5 separate concurrent use days of both our new and old CRM systems we did a final data dump and turned off the old system.  From 9am today we are running solely on the new PHP / POSTGRESQL system.

I dont there is ever a perfect time to migrate IT systems, but Rich has put in a lot of effort to get us here, and I dont think we can be any more prepared than we are.

Watch this space…

Here at Mercian Labels we are always trying to improve our performance in every way possible, and with my academic background in environmental engineering, I’m particularly conscious of our environmental performance.

However, there is a tough issue to deal with in our industry, which is how to dispose of our 2 main waste streams (by weight and volume), these being siliconised paper liner and waste labels/setup/matrix stripping waste.

We never get involved in the recycling of siliconised paper liner as this is always the responsibility of the end user of our labels.  In fact, I expect that this all goes into landfill, as its a difficult waste stream to deal with as you cannt reuse it, or recycle it easily as paper.  In fact, the only successful reuse scheme for siliconised liner is to ship it in bulk to India and shred it to be used in making nappies and paper towels.  The “big player” who advocates and organises this system is Calvin Frost of Channelled Resources. I have investigated this avenue for our customers, but the logistics of collecting very small quantities of liner from our small run label users just dosn’t make this viable.

The second waste stream is waste labels/setup/matrix stripping waste like this.

Its not dense, often covered in ink, and made up of a mix of synthetic or paper and water based acrylic adhesive.  Its a very difficult waste stream to work with, as the adhesive isnt recyclable, even though the paper or (often) PP polypropylene substrate is.  You cant compress it easily to transport it, you cannt shred it easily or use it for packing material.  It fact, its very hard to do much with.

Until recently the only serious option was thermal disposal, which is basically burning it in huge incinerators to generate electricity, fire bricks in kilns, or make cement etc.  This is much better than landfilling it, but its still difficult to dispose of the sort of volume the industry generates like this.  At Mercian Labels, I’ve been working with other BSRLA members to develop viable system to manage this, and we have commissioned a report from a leading European academic to advise us on how to get this system up and running.

However, the leading industry blogger Peter Renton over in the USA from Lightning Labels has recently reported on a project by one of the main industry suppliers to make this material into building! It looks quite an interesting concept.  I hope it turns out to be more a practical solution that a artist’s piece or a stunt.  We will continue to monitor this issue, but I would very much welcome any suggestions on what we coudl do with this waste stream.  Its a big problem in this industry, and one that is going to get worse as landfill costs go up and we strive to further minimise our environmental impact whilst providing good quality goods to our customer.

Wow, I just noticed this in the wordpress console manage. This is the 100th post on our blog. Time flies when you are having fun!

We have now done 3 seperate days of “duplciation”, testing our new PHP MIS system agianst our existing MS database with ever improving results.  Every time we test it in duplicate offline mode we find new things to fix or improve, but its now so dangerously close I can almost grab it…

But, of course its the silly season and its hard to test when a lot of staff are away on hoilday putting the remainder under extra pressure. So, we will hopefuly be runig a final test day next monday, and migrating on tuesday if its all ok.

Better safe than sorry!

We are also restarting the phone system migration to Trixbox with the support of Senokian. This is the last major infrastructre change before we can replace all our machines (bar 1 for SAGE and graphic design software) with ubuntu OSs.