Sustainability at Bobst: How we are making our machines more green

Print Solutions

Sustainability is perhaps the single greatest focus for the packaging industry. Recently, drupa 2024 made sustainability one of its two ‘megatrends’, along with digitalisation. It is an area that is evolving rapidly. Here, Bobst explains its innovations that help companies to be more sustainable.

At Bobst, as a leader in the packaging industry, we know we have a responsibility, not only to commit to sustainability, but to truly innovate in this space.

We believe we are doing so, across three defined streams – our operations, our equipment, and packaging use and end of life. Innovations across these areas will help to change the way packaging is produced to help ensure reduction of waste, increase in efficiencies, compliance with the latest regulations, and the development of environmentally improved packaging solutions.

Evolving our equipment

At the core of the Bobst business are our machines. We appreciate that packaging requires large, high productivity machinery, designed to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which makes the environmental load of machinery in energy and material consumption a significant challenge.

We know that most carbon emissions occur downstream in the value chain – ie at our customers’ sites, where we have less leverage. But we believe that we still have a responsibility to help our customers to reduce those emissions. This is why we have given our teams a target of reducing energy consumption by 20% for the machines we will sell in 2030 versus our baseline of 2022.

Regarding resources, a key strategy is reduction of ink, waste, and substrate. For example, we have made zero fault packaging a reality through innovations like Accucheck, which reduces waste by eliminating only boxes which do not correspond to specific quality criteria. oneECG – our extended colour gamut technology, which digitalises and automates colour management – creates no ink waste, uses 30% less ink, and reduces make ready time and make ready waste by up to 90%. Meanwhile our pioneering Start&Go system for optimal print registration enables fast automatic set up at the start of each job in just a few sheets, enabling considerable savings in sheets used per year. In labels, we have worked with Avery Dennison on a linerless labels solution, which significantly increases material on reel, increasing production efficiency and cutting out the need for backing material.

Another major area of focus is enhancing currently installed machines. We focus on enabling retrofits so that our customers can upgrade previous Bobst machines with more recent developments – for example, adding automatic EcoMode on gravure machines, which can reduce energy consumption by up to 50% during standby. Another upcoming product for gravure and coating machines is a ventilation efficiency kit, which enables the reuse of waste heat and the optimisation of fan power to save massive amounts of thermal energy needed for drying.

Remanufacturing machines is a highly cost effective and sustainable way to increase productivity. Bobst offers machine remanufacturing through CM Services, a global supplier of remanufactured corrugated board and folding carton machinery. In this way, old machines can see their lifetime doubled, while being rejuvenated with new electronics, more efficient motors and the addition of software to enable features such as remote assistance.

These are just some examples of the work we are doing in this area. Sustainability is not just a word for us, but an integral part of the Bobst industry vision to shape the future of the packaging world. Bobst takes the future of humanity at heart and is implementing these actions and many more to make the future of packaging more sustainable in the long term.