Engaged in brutal competition for years, plastics have successfully displaced paper in numerous applications. Processors make and promote plastics, but Yupo America, in Chesapeake, VA, is somewhat of an enigma. It markets a printable plastic film that masquerades as paper but is designed to replace it.
Yupo bills its product of the same name as a synthetic paper. "[Yupo's] made like a plastic and sold like paper," says Paul Mitcham, national marketing manager. "Ninety-seven percent or more of our customers are in the paper industry." Sheets of Yupo are sold to printers, who use it like paper for brochures, calendars, and cards, among other items. A small percentage is used by converters, who print and thermoform Yupo into products for pressure-sensitive labels, in-mold labels, and thermal printing applications.
The product consists of three layers, each composed of a proprietary inorganic-filled, biaxially- -oriented polyolefin (primarily polypropylene) tailored and processed to maximize surface roughness and other properties. Competing products often use a monolayer film with coatings, says Van Horne. Yupo generally has an A-B-A structure, but film for in-mold-labeling is often an A-B-C structure to maximize both printability and adhesion to the plastic substrate.
Many of Yupo's properties are similar to those of paper. For example, it is about as dense as paper, but the plastic is more opaque and has very different folding characteristics than paper, says Bob Van Horne, vp. of production. Its prime benefits over paper, though, are durability, tear and uv resistance, and being waterproof.
The firm also touts its greater printability, bondability, and consistency of properties. "There is no comparison in printing," says Van Horne, although "...you [don't] print on Yupo like you would on paper." Printers need special expertise to handle the product and facilitate bonding of the ink, though it doesn't require pretreatment before printing. Yupo's outer layers contain
Bob Van Horne oversees production of Yupo at the firm's Chesapeake, VA, plant.
fillers than the core layer to encourage ink bonding, which boosts print quality and consistency, the firm notes.
The product is about three times as expensive as paper, Van Horne estimates. In some applications, however, system cost is competitive with paper, which often has to be laminated to boost performance, he says.
To make Yupo, resin is blended, compounded, extruded, and pelletized. Then, the material is heated, calendered, passed through tenter ovens with air blow, and stretched in the cross direction to orient the polymer. After stretching, the sheet is trimmed and aged about 24 h to relax it. Then, top and bottom layers are laminated with heat and pressure, and oriented in the transverse direction.
The product is either slit and sold in rolls, or sheeted and hand-packaged. Recently, the firm added a secondary slitting operation to allow Yupo to be cut to 6-in widths - previously, rolls were at least 26 in wide. Technicians test the product for such properties as tensile strength, thickness, smoothness, opacity, color, and shrinkage before it is shipped. Yupo is available in 70- to 350micron thicknesses and in white only.
The product's development originated in Japan in 1969, from a venture of Mitsubishi Chemical and Oji Paper. Yupo's main plant is located in Kashima, Ibaraki Prefecture (a site of the 2002 World Cup). The first line came onstream in 1971, and the firm added a third line in 1990 to bring capacity to the current level of 28,000 tonnes/yr. Yupo America was formed in 1996 as a subsidiary, and it started up a 10,000-tonne/yr plant in 1998.
In four years, the Chesapeake plant has become the prime export source for the product. "We are the main supplier for Yupo Europe," says Van Horne. "Europe is [our] primary export market."
The Chesapeake facility exports a little more than 10% of its production. More exotic formulations are usually sourced from Japan.
One example of the firm's paperplastic dichotomy is the way the product's thickness is measured. While packages of the sheet are labeled by weight like paper, "internally we use microns [to describe its thickness]," Van Horne notes.
Jeremiah Rose irose@modplas.com
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