Sidel initiates cost-saving PET solution for beverage industry

To reduce the amount of PET used in beverage bottles worldwide and help producers save money and improve their environmental footprint, Sidel, a global provider of PET solutions for liquid packaging, has unveiled an online PET savings calculator that enables beverage producers and bottlers to calculate for themselves what savings could be achieved based on their own production parameters.

“The benefits of lightweighting PET bottles are well known in the beverage industry,” said Clive Smith, zone vice-president for the Middle East and Africa at Sidel.

“According to our calculations there remains a great opportunity for the beverage industry to reduce raw material usage, save costs and improve environmental footprints by adopting new bottle designs, especially for water and carbonated soft drinks (CSD),” added Smith.

He stressed that modern designs were often only subtle appearance variations of existing designs that could easily be applied to production lines with no difference to the end consumer experience.

In the past 18 months, Sidel has launched several bottle design innovations, including its ‘RightWeight’ bottle concept, which can be applied across categories, and its range of Sidel StarLite bottle bases for water and CSD.

RightWeight is the proprietary bottle design process that Sidel uses to ensure a bottle is both light and strong enough to survive global supply chains, while looking good at the point of sale.

According to Sidel data, globally, the average line can save between $300,000 and $1 million, with faster lines or larger bottle formats capable of saving even more. This leads to an approximate average saving per bottle of up to 0.005 dollars per 0.5 litre bottle or 0.007 dollars per 2 litre bottle for still water, and 0.005 dollars per 0.5 litre bottle or 0.006 dollars per 2 litre bottle for CSD, the firm said.

According to Euromonitor forecasts for 2014-2018, released in March 2014, 216 billion PET bottles for still water and 116 billion PET bottles for CSD will have been produced by the end of the year.

Samuel Gobbe, Service Director, Sidel GMEA, said, “We did the calculation exercise to show the potential that RightWeighting provides globally. However, we also recognised the value of producers being able to find out the specific savings that they can achieve and have therefore introduced the packaging calculator to enable them to do so.”

ODINAKA ANUDU