Meyers, a renowned packaging and label printer based in Minnesota, USA, has announced the successful implementation of an ambitious retrofit programme to upgrade to UV LED curing systems across all main production lines at its Minneapolis facility.
The primary objective of the programme is to significantly reduce energy consumption and costs at the plant, whilst reducing Meyers’ Scope One, Two and Three emissions, and its subsequent carbon footprint. These factors are known to have a direct effect on the company’s competitiveness and its ability to secure new business from its sustainability-conscious customers, which include many megabrands and household names among them.
Michael Dillon, Chief Revenue Officer at Meyers, explains this relationship between the company’s carbon footprint and its competitive edge: “What matters most to our sustainability-conscious clients is what our footprint is, because our footprint is their footprint. Clients want to know, what is the impact that we’re having, and they’re taking that into consideration while they’re picking vendors and while they’re allocating costs, a lot of them are offsetting the impact of their supply chain, so the impact that we’re having matters to them. So when we use fewer resources, that has a tangible benefit.
“They look at what’s called Scopes One, Two and Three emissions. Scope One is what happens at your facility. Scope Two is what happens to get the utilities that you use to you, so if you’re using electricity generated from coal you’ll have a much larger Scope Two than if you’re using electricity generated from wind and solar. Scope Three is what happens upstream and downstream from your own operations, so that would be for us what goes into growing trees that get harvested to become paper, and then what happens after it leaves here. So for us that’s shipping our product, it’s end of life.”
He gives an example of how Meyers’ sustainability credentials have an effect on their ability to win new business: “One of our large leading customers, a giant household name, does award business based on the sustainability of their suppliers. They actually calculate the cost of the impact of everything that they source, and that cost of offsetting that environmental impact gets levied upon the department that’s buying the supplies. There’s a one-to-one relationship on the impact that you’re having on the environment and the cost that they view of buying from you as a supplier.”
He concludes: “It literally makes us lower cost than the alternative suppliers that aren’t as focused on sustainability.”
The management team at Meyers made the bold move of having their three main production lines retrofitted to run UV LED curing, simultaneously. However, it was imperative that they could continue to selectively use conventional UV Arc curing where necessary, and this was one of several reasons why they chose to work with GEW for the UV system retrofits. They now use a combination of GEW’s AeroLED and LeoLED
lampheads, alongside E2C Arc lamps where necessary, on multiple machines across the shop floor. GEW’s patented, interchangeable ‘ArcLED’ technology makes this possible, as each print station can be changed to run either UV LED or UV Arc according to the job in hand.
Dave McConnon, Chief Operating Officer at Meyers, explains: “We chose GEW for a few reasons, but number one was that we needed the flexibility to be able to do Arc curing or LED, and the cartridge system that GEW has in place really lends itself perfectly to that. We run a lot of our work interchangeably between all three of those machines and we wanted the ability to have identical capability between the machines, so that we could move work back and forth knowing that we would be using the same technology.
“We generally use the LED systems for the pigmented inks and Arc cassettes for curing adhesives, varnishes and those types of things. We do have a few projects where customers have qualified UV technology for their inks and we’ll use the E2C cassettes for those projects as well. To be able to switch between LED and Arc curing gives us all kinds of flexibility, both for our current customer base as well as any future projects that we run into.”
