Toray Applies Market-Leading Letterpress Technology to Develop Printing Industry’s First Fully Water Developable Flexographic Plate

Published: November 28, 2023

Toray Industries, Inc., has developed a flexographic plate (see note 1) that offers full water development (note 2) and high-definition printing quality, now available under the new RESOLUCIA™ brand. The company plans to launch the new offering in January 2024.

Toray has long served letterpress printing customers worldwide, capturing the no. 1 position in that market with TORELIEF™ (note 3), which combines high-definition printing quality and excellent durability. The company responded to an emerging shift from letterpress to flexographic printing by applying TORELIEF™ technology in developing the RESOLUCIA™ flexographic plate for label applications.

RESOLUCIA™ is a portmanteau of Resolution, Lucid, and Advance, embodying Toray’s quest to deliver colorful and vivid printing with flexographic plates.

Technological innovations enabled Toray to deliver a resolution of around 200 lines per inch (note 4) with RESOLUCIA™. This improves image reproducibility. It also ensures high production efficiency by resulting in a processing time of around 24 minutes, which Toray estimates is more than 70 percent faster than the conventional solvent development technique, reflecting full water development. Another advantage of RESOLUCIA™ is that, in principle, there is no need for companies wishing to use it to invest in new plate-making equipment if they already employ TORELIEF™ or other letterpress plates.

Applications for flexographic printing have broadened in recent years beyond corrugated cardboard to encompass packaging materials, including labels and flexible packaging. Toray is researching the use of RESOLUCIA™ for mono-materials flexible packaging printing. That is because the adoption of mono-material packaging substrates should rise with recycling packaging materials uptakes.

Labelexpo Asia 2023 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre from December 5-8, 2023, is Asia’s biggest label and packaging printing event. From that gathering, Toray looks to expand RESOLUCIA™ promotional efforts at domestic and international printing-related exhibitions.

Toray will keep leveraging its core technologies of synthetic organic and polymer chemistry, biotechnology, and nanotechnology in keeping with its commitment to innovating ideas, technologies, and products that deliver new value to create advanced materials and innovative technologies that contribute to social progress.

Notes

1. Flexographic printing is a letterpress printing technique employing resin or rubber plate materials. A common application is printing on cardboard and other materials whose surfaces are not flat. Recent years have seen its use for such packaging materials as labels and flexible packaging because it makes color adjustments and other operations relatively easy.
2. Full water development uses only room temperature tap water for printing plate development, eliminating the use of organic solvents or additives. Development: removing resins from non-image areas to form visible images.
3. Toray dominates the global photosensitive letterpress market with TORELIEF™, reflecting its high image reproducibility, diverse thicknesses and hardnesses, and extensive applications.
4. The line number refers to the number of dots per inch as a measure of printed image detail. For example, 175 lines represent an image with 175 dots per inch. The higher the number of lines, the smaller dot sizes and the greater the detail. Typically, 175 lines are employed color printed materials, while 200 lines allows for higher-definition printing.