Certified materials for your cutting die – CITOject F

Are the materials in your cutting die safe with respect to food packaging? With a view to everyone’s health, it is of course essential that only safe packaging is used to pack foods. But what good is this if the safe cardboard or corrugated board is contaminated during processing? This is why legislation is focussing more and more on materials that come into contact with food and fodder packaging during processing.

CITO has understood that its customers are increasingly having to face up to this responsibility. European legislators are currently taking a critical look at the possible release of contaminants during the use of plastic materials in the diecutting process. This practically affects all ejection materials that are used on cutting dies. After all, these do in fact come into contact with the packaging during the diecutting process. Therefore ejection materials can pass on contaminants to the packaging. Unfortunately, in our industry, materials that were not developed for this application on cutting dies, are normally used. Consequently, it will be extremely difficult to obtain a safety declaration.

This is why CITO has been working on developing special ejection materials for the packaging production process for many years now. This relates both to profiles for special technical uses and to plates too, such as are used widely on cutting dies. Developing these kinds of materials oneself, it is clear that we are not concerned solely with the material’s safe use in the food industry but also with optimising the performance during the diecutting of the packaging. The specific requirements of the packaging industry have been taken into account here: better compressibility to reduce the cutting pressure, quicker reaction to make the cutting process safer and to avoid interruptions in production, minimise horizontal expansion in order to support holding points, and of course a lower weight too so as to facilitate handling of the cutting dies.

Millions of pieces of data have been analysed during the development of the CITO ejection materials, data that was gathered specifically from the cutting process for packaging made from folding boxboard and corrugated board. The development process also included endurance tests on our own simulation systems, a high-speed video analysis of the cutting process and of course, innumerable practical tests on diecutting machines. One result of these many years of development work is the ejection material CITOject F.

This material is miles ahead of any other elastomer; the demand for this material, which has been specially developed for cutting dies, is increasing rapidly.

It goes without saying that CITO also considered the material’s safety for the production of food and fodder packaging during its development from the very beginning. This is why CITOject F has corresponding safety declarations from the ISEGA testing and certification institute.

But this is not all by a long chalk: CITO is constantly pursuing an integrated approach that also includes the production process for the tools. What is important here is a closed structure of the material so as to avoid any contamination during cutting with a water jet. In addition, only adhesives that are safe too may be used. Cyanoacrylate adhesives are still being used in the production of cutting dies, an absolutely absurd situation in connection with food packaging. This is why you should use CITOject F with EasyFix – both of which have been classified as safe by ISEGA. The difference in price to conventional ejection materials is marginal, and even if a cutting die does cost slightly more, this possible disadvantage will be more than compensated by the higher productivity. So you can use safe materials and at the same time increase your productivity. So why wallow in the past and continue to use unsuitable materials and toxic adhesives?
CITOject F – the solution for the present and the future.

Jürgen Mariën

Do you have any more questions?

Your contact SpainSpain (change)