Swedish UMV Coating System is about to crack the code of how to coat papers and cardboard with fossil free barriers. It creates the opportunity to produce food packaging that is 100% made up of materials from biological materials.
To coat the cardboard to food packaging with fossil free barriers has long been a hard nut to crack. No one has yet succeeded in industrial scale without creating pores in the barrier that makes packaging less dense and therefore unusable. But after a week long pilot run, it seems that the UMV Coating Systems in Säffle is on the way to solving this global problem.
- It looks promising, but we don’t want to draw any conclusions before all the analyses are made, says Per Emilsson, Coating Expert at UMV Coating Systems.
Last spring, UMV Coating Systems was granted funding from Vinnova to conduct pilot tests with its newly developed coater INVO Coater. An initial analytical work undertaken at University of Karlstad had yielded promising results. Now they wanted to go ahead with a major investigation to study if the concept is to coat the fossil-free barriers in full scale.
During week 36, UMV Coating Systems has conducted 35 pilot runs in its own machinery in Säffle, and two researchers from University of Karlstad analyze the results.
– We test how good the barrier is, and it looks very promising. We will carry out a battery of tests to determine the different barrier properties. We check fat resistance, oxygen permeability and much more. In accordance with established standard methods for testing barriers in food packaging. There is still a lot of analysis to do, but so far we have only seen positive results, says Pia Eriksson, a development engineer at University of Karlstad.
