Bostik is a leading adhesives specialist emerging from an agreement between Coates India and Bostik UK in 1991. Headquartered in Bengaluru, Bostik India has three factories and fifteen warehouses in the country. In 2018, it opened a new state-of-the-art modern plant in Gujarat for producing hot melt pressure sensitive adhesives (HMPSA) for industrial purposes such as tapes, pressure-sensitive labels, transport and footwear.
At Packplus 2019 in New Delhi, Bostik focussed on two products that the company developed specifically for the Indian market. LF 225 and H300M are the most stable products offered by the company for PET and MPET, says Daniel Thong, regional market manager – Flexible Packaging, Bostik, “We have a plant in Gujarat that makes lamination adhesives. We have built this plant to serve India and its neighbouring markets for the next 10 years. We’ve made sure the capacity is pretty big so that it can supply even when the demand increases.”
“In India, we don’t simply have a manufacturing plant but also a unit for R&D and new product development. The Gujarat plant has enough capacity to produce for the entire south-east Asian region. Two of the products that we’ve launched in India have also been supplied to other countries. We’ve been supplying to these markets successfully in the last few years and have grown in these regions, thanks to the growth in the flexible packaging vertical. We always try to be ahead in terms of innovation, relative to current demand. We’re actually over-performing because we were bringing products addressing the pain points of converters,” Thong adds.
High speed solvent-free adhesives
Apart from flexible packaging, Bostik has also registered tremendous growth in the non-woven segment. Bostik believes that flexible packaging and non-woven are the two fastest growing packaging verticals in India. The two products launched by Bostik which the company was promoting at Packplus 2019 were solvent-free adhesives. The differentiator is actually that the product supports high-speeds.
“The problem in India for solvent-free lamination is that you have lot of PE and metallized PE. But, you cannot run high-speed. Hence, we’ve developed this product to support higher speeds. With the previous range of adhesives, one could run in the range of 150 meters a minute to 200 meters a minute,” explains Wladimir Moraes, marketing manager, Global Flexible Packaging, Bostik. The two products that were promoted by the company at Packplus 2019 were launched in January 2019. The products were developed last year and the company perfomed various tests and trial runs before commercializing them in the Indian sub-continent region.
Sustainability & recyclability of flexible packaging – A global challenge
“I think that plastics have become a global challenge. Its not just India that is struggling with its plastic waste, Europe, which is much ahead in terms of technology is also facing this challenge. At Bostik, we sell lamination adhesives, we sell sealing resins but we’re talking about lamination adhesives here. We have a whole range of polyesters and polymers that are using sealing of PE films, a large segment in India. We must think about the end-of-life aspects of these products. We’re working within the value-chain with our customers. Unfortunately, there is no such thing such as a sustainable adhesive,” Moraes adds.
Flexible packaging has been ridden with challenges. Over the years, various innovations have helped face these challenges and the industry was successful each time. This challenge of sustainability, according to Moraes will prove to be a driver for innovation. Bostik is joining hands with associations that have similar agenda to come up with coherent solutions. The company is assessing a portfolio of adhesives to suit the recyclers’ requirements without compromizing the various aspects of quality.
