Discover Our Range of Removable Adhesives

Have you ever bought a book for a long flight and found that you’ve managed to peel away half the front cover when removing the price label? Or my personal favourite, after buying yourself a new pair of shoes, you cannot wait to wear them, only to find that you have to spend over thirty minutes scraping and scratching at the price label, to hide evidence of the fact that your shoes cost just £10 on sale?

What Water-Based Adhesives Do You Supply?

These are just a sample of the many reasons why removable labels are rapidly becoming a necessity in the labelling world. At Smith & McLaurin we have a wide range of removable adhesives available unlimited face and liner combinations. We offer three main acrylic water-based adhesives - R144, SR720 & CR200 and one specialty adhesive - CMS35.

Our standard removable R144 offers good initial tack while still retaining its removability from a variety of substrates including glass, metal, polyethylene and polypropylene. The adhesive exhibits excellent ageing characteristics and is also suitable for some chilled cabinet applications. Our most popular constructions include R144 with our thermal semi/top-coated papers and films which are normally used in barcode labelling of prepacked foods where resistance to PVC stretch wrap, oil, grease and water are required, eg. Cheese, meat, poultry; it is also useful for pallet labelling and other logistics applications.

We also offer customers SR720 which is used extensively in pharmaceutical labelling applications, e.g. Labels which include patient details/dosage information and are applied to prescription boxes and bottles.

Our CR200 offers excellent results when used with direct thermal face materials and also demonstrates a high level of removability from plastic surfaces in particular. A good example where this adhesive is used is in plastic plant-pot labelling in garden centres.


Finally, we have CMS35, our versatile microsphere adhesive, which falls within our AdaptUltra range under the name MicroPeel . This specialty adhesive is designed to give excellent removability from variable textured substrates e.g. price labels on greeting cards, which might have different textures with glitter etc. It is also used within peel/reseal applications such as supermarket pasta packets and for price labels on premium items such as specialty gift boxes of chocolates. There is also a UV resistant grade of this adhesive available that is particularly useful for window labelling.

Alternative to Removable Adhesives

An alternative to using a removable adhesive is our water wash-off range. HydroPerm, also a part of our AdaptUltra brand, includes our range of water wash-off materials utilizing our CWW20 adhesive, which is a modified aqueous acrylic emulsion that offers high initial tack and high ultimate adhesive to polar and non-polar substrates. This adhesive is excellent for the applications where the containers have to be reused e.g. labelling of beer barrels, hospital food trays, laboratory equipment and for pallet labels. Our standard WW630 adhesive offers an extremely high initial tack and is designed to wash off rough low energy surfaces e.g. plastic pallet labels. The WW620 adhesive is just the lower initial tack version of the WW630.


Additionally, if you are looking for an environmentally friendly label, both our removable and water wash-off adhesives can be used in conjunction with our wide range of environmentally face materials from our AdaptEco range including recycled papers, PLA films and FSC certified materials.

Our latest and most innovative adhesive is called PurityWash, these first-to-market adhesives allow labels to wash off PP, PE, HDPE and PET bottles and containers during industrial cleaning processes, leaving materials residue free which maximises the recyclability of both the PET bottles and label materials. Discover why Wash Off Adhesives Are on The Rise in this article, in short, they present brands with enhanced recyclability and sustainability credentials.