We’ve had an increase in the number of employees with dermatitis. What is the cause
and what can I do to help reduce the risks?

Firstly, if you haven’t already, refer your employees for medical diagnosis and treatment. Print workers who use inks, wash-up solutions and the like are at a higher risk of developing dermatitis than workers in general. However, you need to establish if this outbreak is work-related.

Some helpful clues to recognise a work-related cause are: that it is primarily on the hands and face; the condition improves away from work and relapses on return; more than one person who handle the same materials or work in the same area are affected.

An outbreak should motivate you to review your risk assessment and investigate the cause. You can do this by interviewing your employees and observing work practice. To manage dermatitis in your workplace, take the following steps: take action to avoid or reduce employee contact with materials that cause dermatitis; where contact cannot be avoided, select appropriate gloves and ensure they are used correctly; provide hand creams; carry out skin checks; and provide information and training.

You should also read ‘COSHH Essentials for Printers’ – this guidance is written specifically for the printing industry. It describes in more detail how to control exposure to chemicals in a range of common printing processes and tasks. Visit www.hse.gov.uk/printing/dermatitis. Go to www.hse.gov.uk/skin for more general information on work-related skin disease.

To understand why this outbreak has occurred, observe what happens in your workplace. Have there been any changes, such as new processes, materials handled or skin care products? Have you done everything you can to avoid contact? Are existing ‘exposure control’ measures still working? Have you provided the right type of gloves? Are employees using them correctly? Are employees protecting their skin by washing, drying and moisturising properly? Have you given them sufficient training?

If you are unable to identify an obvious cause and any actions to improve preventative measures have been unsuccessful in dealing with dermatitis, it may be necessary to call in specialist help.

Finally, if you have confirmed cases of work-related dermatitis at your site, then the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations, 1995 require you to report this to the Health and Safety Executive.

Bob Rajan
Health and Safety Executive

I head up a small B3 offset and digital printer and currently send out around £1,200 in laminating, but I want to bring it in-house. What are the options and how much should I pay?

The first thing you need to do is evaluate the breakdown of run lengths. If you’re doing mostly short runs, then you might be able to go for an entry-level hand-fed laminator. If you’re doing lots of short-run digital jobs, which are generally more expensive per unit and don’t produce any overs, then a hand-fed machine is good because there’s no makeready and no wasted sheets.

But with that kind of budget, my guess is that you’ll need a higher-spec suction-fed machine. Even if you only need to laminate the occasional run of 5,000, you’ll need to go suction-fed if you want to do them in-house.

As with any new piece of kit, you’ll also need to think about manpower. One of the advantages of an automated laminator is that you could run it adjacent to, say, a guillotine and that operator could also handle the laminator.

When you start shopping around, keep your eye out for a machine with an integrated cutting unit. Basic laminators don’t always have a cutter, which means you are effectively turning your stack of sheets into one big web held together with laminating film. I wouldn’t envy the person who ends up having to hand-feed this through a guillotine.

Another key consideration is if the machine is suitable for the work environment. If it’s going in to a digital department, then you should look for a quiet machine. Also make sure the equipment footprint is appropriate. Laminators use heat to melt the film, and they can be either oil- or water-heated. I advise you to look for an oil-heated model. Water-heated laminators need to be plumbed in and continually drained, plus they can be prone to leakage.

Price-wise, expect to pay about £10,000 for a hand-fed model and £33,000 for suction-fed, though this will differ depending on the model and the specs, and whether you go for new or secondhand.

An equipment dealer, such as Friedheim International, will also be able to supply you with film. Take care with digital work – you might need a high-tack film because, generally,it will need stickier adhesive. This depends on which print engine you use as there are many toner types, which all react differently to heat and lamination.

Stuart Bamford
UK & Ireland sales manager
Friedheim International

We already do some packaging work on our large-format sheetfed offset press, and we’re now trying to win pharmaceutical clients. We’ve been told that having ‘sheet inspection’ could help. Can you explain?

The concept behind the incorporation of an inline sheet inspection system is to offer the printer the tools to create the perfect printed stack – finished printed sheets without any flaws. This should be of particular interest to printers producing work for the high-end markets, but particularly exciting for those involved in such areas as pharmaceuticals, where quality is an absolute essential. On-box dosage instructions, for example, simply have to be printed correctly, and also anti-counterfeiting measures incorporated into the design have to be printed accurately to be effective. Such are the intricacies of these that it is often difficult for the printer to examine them with the naked eye.

A typical inspection system built into a litho press will utilise a very high-speed camera positioned after the last printing unit, linked to an equally high-speed computer for evaluation of the data. The system will compare the image on the printed sheet to the image of a sheet passed by the customer and held within the computer.

Such operations happen at blindingly high speeds – Manroland’s InlineInspector, for example, examines every 0.5mm portion of a B1 image six times as the sheet passes through, while still printing at up to 16,000 sheets per hour.

If any errors are spotted on the sheet – such as hickies, dust spots, filling in, creasing, colour quality issues, ink problems, or even substrate problems – the operator will be alerted, a tab inserted in the stack at that point, and an on-screen image of the sheet will appear with the problem area highlighted. This then allows remedial action to be taken.
Working hand-in-hand with the inspector system, some manufacturers will also provide an automated sorting system that actually diverts the imperfect sheets away from the finished stack and into a reject delivery pile. Where this is not employed, the automatically inserted tabs will highlight to an operator where problems occurred during the run, and which sheets should be manually removed from the finished stack.

Gary Doman
UK & Ireland sales manager
Friedheim International