Composites (Graphic products option)

A composite is what you get when two different materials are combined so that the result outperforms either one on its own. In graphic products this is everywhere: a foil-lined juice carton, a laminated menu, a chipboard shelf and a particleboard display unit all marry materials to gain a property a single material could not provide. The drinks carton borrows paper for stiffness and printing, plastic for sealing and a wafer of aluminium foil for a perfect barrier against light and air. None of them alone would keep juice fresh on a shelf.

This note covers the graphic-products composites objectives: what a composite is and how it is classified by the way its parts are combined; the properties that make composites so useful, such as barrier performance, strength-to-weight and rigidity; the environmental impact, which is dominated by the difficulty of separating bonded layers for recycling; and the two named families, foil-based composites and particle-based composites, with the everyday products each one makes possible.