Intercol’s mission to provide the best running adhesives for your machine has resulted in development of reliable, high-performance adhesive products that meet the most outstanding production of challenges
Hot melt adhesives offer 100% solids and will be in a solid state at room temperature. These glues are activated upon heating and liquid above their softening point to be processed in hot melt application equipment. Hot melt glues retain the ability to wet on the substrate until they solidify and return to a physical state that has structural integrity. Hot melt glues are used in a wide range of applications such as food packaging, automotive, white goods assembly, furniture production and self adhesive materials such as tapes and labels.
The potential of hot melt adhesives was recognised in the 1960s. Hot melt glues now has gained a reputation where many production companies rely on across a variety of applications including, packaging, converting, labelling, carton, corrugated, woodworking product assembly and bookbinding.
With our products and technial advice we are helping to solve the problems in production processes. The adhesive industry is historically typified by large, multi-national companies supplying bulk quantities of standard products to the market, where Intercol has become a trusted servicer of bespoke niche needs. With an adhesive range of several thousand combinations, and ever increasing number of production lines in the adhesive production, Intercol is able to produce batches between 100Kg and ten tonnes at any one time. Offering the flexibility needed to develop a tailored adhesive production directly after. This has led to Intercol’s success.
The packging industryis the largest consumer of adhesives for Intercol in Europe so targeting here with food approved adhesives is strategically very important.
Intercol’s aim is producing quality products. Scientifically formulated and technically advanced, its waterbased and hot melt adhesives consistently outperform traditional glues. Intercol has helped redefine the standards for adhesive performance for e.g. thermostable polyolefin hot melts and waterbased adhesives for inliner folder gluer machines.
The current standard of polyolefin, metallocene and EVA based adhesives offer clear, clean running performance. These glues have become more or less standard for food packaging.
For corrugated inliner adhesives, there is a challenge of getting a fast setting speed, good bond to corrugated substrates, water resistance, good machine stop/starts and foodsafe optical detectable waterbased adhesives.
Further to the above range of adhesives a major source of growth for Intercol during 2018 was its growth in pressure sensitivity adhesives (PSA’s), especially in relation to the flexible packaging market. For specific applications like mail order bags and packages and parcel boxes used to deliver clothing from online retailers, there is an increase of applications that use a self-adhesive strip to seal it. For sealing at the sender, but also a second self adhesive strip for returning purposes. To service this fast growing market there is a high performing self adhesive hot melt PSA range. Hot melt adhesives can be quickly applied and work effectively on a range of different applications, temperatures and environments, PSA adhesives has come to be one of our fastest growing product groups.
Intercol is excited to be in the process of commissioning a new packaging product line enabling smaller pillows and blocks for product assembly and PSA adhesives. The line is also increasing our capacity by approximately 3000 tonnes. So, the focus for us as a business in 2019 will be in selling capacity in Europe.