Canon has opened a new central production facility for its UVgel ink after production volumes doubled in the past year to keep up with demand.
Puts (right): “Our new facility has been designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible”
Opened in December, the new premises are situated on the manufacturer’s innovation and development campus in Venlo, the Netherlands, and the operation is now in full operation providing ink for the Colorado family of roll-to-roll, large-format printers.
In 2019, Canon completed more than 1,200 Colorado installations, which has led to a significant uptick in demand, with average volumes worldwide per device now exceeding 15,000sqm/year. The highest volumes are hitting 100,000sqm/year.
Canon Vice President for Manufacturing and Logistics Rob Puts said: “We’ve been able to double our ink production in less than a year and our operations team is eager to continue to help our customers confidently print growing volumes of large format roll-to-roll graphics. “At the same time, our new facility has been designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. With a focus on operational efficiencies, the facility is delivering increased energy savings by reusing cooling capacity from other production plants on our campus and using a heat exchange unit to warm the cool air coming into the building with the heat of the air leaving the production hall.”
The new ink production centre runs a workflow which processes raw ingredients in multiple steps and in barrels of 200 litres for each colour before it is transferred into ink bottles for immediate shipment.
