Screen vs.
PS Label
When you think of eliminating materials from your packaging, what comes to mind: Reducing the gram weight of a bottle? Converting to a less dense material? Eliminating a secondary carton? Have you ever thought of doing away with your pressure sensitive labels?
Believe it or not, you can reduce the total weight of your rigid packaging by 6% to 10%, simply by converting from PS labels to direct screen printing. How? The average gram weight for a 12-ounce PET Boston Round would be about 32.0 grams. Typical pressure-sensitive labels on a 12-ounce personal care bottle weigh between 1.8 and 3.2 grams; by contrast, the weight of the ink required to screen print onto that same bottle is only about 0.1 grams. If you sell 100,000 bottles a year, the label stock to decorate them would weigh somewhere between 6,350 and 11,286 pounds). With screen printing, you would only add about 353 pounds of ink to your packaging’s mass.
And there’s more: The weight of the label that makes it onto your bottle is just a small part of what that label started with. Every pressure-sensitive label has a carrier roll, and most diecut labels have areas around them that are trimmed off and thrown into the waste stream. When you also factor in the energy costs to manufacture labels, transport them to where they are applied, and apply them, direct screen printing has a dramatic advantage when it comes to the environment.