With Esko Solvent Saver, Contact Originators saves on waste and materials while improving plate quality

Contact Originators Group, a privately-owned company established in 1992 in Stockport, UK, is renowned for its innovative approach to packaging origination, graphics management and flexographic plate production. With over 70 employees based in its new purpose-built 32,000 sq ft facility in Dukinfield, Greater Manchester, Contact Originators houses the latest hardware and software technologies for printing reprographics and flexographic plate production. Recently marking its 30th anniversary, the company operates across the UK and Europe and is rightly proud of its achievement in being the first flexo platemaking company in the UK to have gained Esko HD Flexo accreditation in the corrugated industry.

Contact Originators has made significant inroads in boosting its own in-house capabilities through bold machine investment, with the ultimate goal of offering its print customers a more connected, efficient and sustainable prepress and on-press service.

The Contact Originators team’s ethos lies in ‘driving the print and brand experience through print innovation’. This absolute focus on delivering advances both in its own prepress production efficiency and quality, as well as its customers’ print performance, has assured the company of its leading market position in the UK corrugated market, as well as ensuring Contact Originators is a beta testing partner for Esko.

Innovating to improve efficiency

“We have a relationship with Esko that goes back many years, with a complete ecosystem of the company’s integrated software and hardware at our state-of-the-art facility,” said Nick Mitchell, Operations Director with Contact Originators. “As a member of the pre-release testing community, we shared ideas with Esko to develop, test and provide real-production data and hone the innovative new Solvent Saver, which tackles some of the biggest challenges flexo platemakers face today.

“With the economic climate meaning that raw material costs are at an all-time high, and with all industries under increasing pressure to become more sustainable, it’s imperative for businesses like ours to reduce waste – and Solvent Saver does just that.”

As part of Flexo Engine within Esko Automation Engine, the Solvent Saver software ‘fills in the gaps’ during plate production to ensure that the entire plate is not being processed, leaving less polymer within the solvent.

Addressing sustainability and economic issues

“When we first began working on this project, we were already very committed to our own sustainability drive,” added Nick. “We were looking at ways of saving energy and removing the number of solvent distillations we were undertaking on site. Working closely with the Esko R&D team we were able to provide real-time data to show what was working well and what to tweak.

“Solvent Saver actually addresses both the sustainability and economic issues that all platemakers face today. Regardless of whether a business purchases solvent by the barrel or, like us, is distilling its own, it’s just common sense that wasting less of it has significant benefits.”

Benefits all round

“Since using Solvent Saver, we’ve reduced our solvent wastage from 20% to an average of around just 10%,” said Nick. “That soon adds up, and so across the year we anticipate savings of around 7,500 liters of solvent, based on using 5,000 m2 of thick plates for corrugated work.”

Nick said that not only does this deliver against the sustainability goals, but also helps lower costs to protect margins during a challenging economic period.

Nick said that following the successful trialing of Solvent Saver, Contact Originators was now using the solution across all its flexo plate production.

Robert Bruce, Esko Product Manager, Flexo Software, said working together with Contact Originators had helped accelerate and fine-tune the development of the technology. “It’s fantastic to see Nick and the team enjoying such benefits with Solvent Saver,” he said.