PET bottles designed to withstand the filler pressure and hold shape during long-term storage under internal pressure are now the most common packaging format for carbonated soft drinks.
PET bottles have achieved this position not just because of the design flexibility and significant marketing opportunities that the material offers but also because they have better safety characteristics and lighter weight than glass bottles and a smaller environmental impact than either glass bottles or aluminium cans. Particularly for consumers ‘on the go’, the ability to reseal the bottle gives this packaging format a competitive advantage over cans.
At the same time, PET offers carbonated soft drinks brand owners and retailers good shelf life and appeal.
Safety
Many sporting and entertainment events now permit drinks to be served only in PET bottles or plastic cups because of health and safety concerns about other packaging formats. PET bottles are preferred by retailers at these venues because it avoids the process of having to pour drinks into plastic cups, making service faster and giving consumers something that is easier to carry.
PET bottles are virtually impossible to break and, even when crushed, they have no sharp edges.
For producers, bottlers, shippers and retailers (as well as for end users) the integrity of PET bottles means no losses from breakage.
PET has additional health and safety benefits. There is no risk, for example, of production failures leading to sharp edges on containers or sharp fragments contaminating the brand owner’s products.
Weight
A typical PET beverage bottle is only a fraction of the weight of its glass equivalent. This means that the environmental and financial transport costs for beverages packed in PET can be substantially lower than for beverages in glass bottles.
Petainer has been involved in several projects with leading brewers aimed at ‘lightweighting’ bottles to maximise the weight benefits of the PET packaging format – and also providing economic and environmental benefits through reduced materials use.
Environmental impact
Studies have shown that producing PET containers results in less greenhouse gas emissions and uses less energy than glass or aluminium cans. PET beer bottles are fully recyclable and, in some cases, reusable.
The use of refillable PET bottles has all the environmental advantages implicit in the material combined with benefits arising from the bottle being reused up to 25 times in its lifetime, prior to being recycled in a ‘closed loop’ where the material is used to create new containers. Where systems and facilities for this type of reuse and recycling exist, this is a highly sustainable packaging technology.
Petainer is the market leader in refillable technologies in Western Europe and Scandinavia and we are working closely with many major brands to further improve the environmental performance of refillable containers.
Shelf life
The shelf life of a carbonated soft drink is determined primarily by loss of carbonation. Recent developments in PET have greatly increased the shelf life that it can offer because of significant improvements in barrier materials and technologies which help to retain CO2.
The shelf life is determined not only by the material of the container and closure (gas permeation through the bottle closure can be significant for small bottle sizes) but also by the way the bottle is designed and manufactured.
Shelf appeal
PET bottles can be produced in a wide range of shapes and sizes. They can also be produced in a range of colours and opacities – or the material can be left in its natural highly transparent state where its startling clarity allows the product in the container to be displayed to the consumer. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination of the designer.
This permits bottles to be created which boost sales through their ‘shelf appeal’, grabbing the attention of shoppers.
Petainer has considerable expertise not just in the technology of PET bottle manufacture but also in understanding consumers. We undertake international market research to investigate the relationship between brands, products, packaging and purchasing. This expertise is available to our customers through our extensive consultancy services.
We undertake fully-informed ‘packaging audits’ for brand owners, identifying opportunities to introduce new packaging concepts. We have helped major brands introduce PET packaging in order to obtain functional, cost and sales benefits. Combining our expertise in ‘design for manufacture’ and ‘design for market’ produces sustainable, cost-effective packaging with real shelf appeal.
At Petainer we have a passion for innovation and for taking new ideas from concept through to production.
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