PETpla.net Insider 12 / 2013

CAPPING / CLOSURES 30 PET planet insider Vol. 14 No. 12/13 www.petpla.net A PETplanet study at K 2013 Caps & closures K 2013, the “No 1 International Trade Fair for Plastics and Rubber Worldwide”, held at Düsseldorf offered the opportu- nity to cast an analytical eye over the sector and to report on it. K 2013 has lived up to its reputation as a technology fair. In a three-year cycle the “Plastics and Rubber Indus- tries“ showcase their new products, again and again prov- ing their innovative capability and defining state of the art technology anew. And it has been the same again this year, throughout all the plastics processing industries, including and in particular for the packaging industries with their “caps & closures, packaging and thin-wall technologies“ sectors. We spoke with the companies at K 2013. In this article and the next – as a complement to the “Market Survey” begin- ning in this issue – we shall take the opportunity to describe the state of the art technology and the developments and try to create some transparency. We owe a thank you to all those who demonstrated their products for us and talked to us about “state-of-the-art“, innovative trends, competitive differentiation and their strategies for the coming years. Caps and closures make up a significant part of drinks packaging and are thus of interest to PETplanet insider. The market for beverages caps and closures is a sophisticated and highly complex market in which the best brains in a very wide range of companies are involved – namely, the developers and designers, the builders of machinery for mould, hot runner and machine, the convert- ers for plastics processing and, last but not least, the bottlers who also manufacture caps and are responsi- ble for closing/sealing the bottles. And all these ‘value-creators‘ are moving forward as one and together – with great intensity and concentration – they ensure maximum performance and productivity of processes – in the manufacture of a part that is small but nevertheless needed on a massive scale, namely the plastic closure on a PET bottle. Caps and closures: the products The products involved are caps & closures made from plastic material, for beverages in PET and beverages alone, such as for water, carbonates, hot fill and ascetic fill – as well as for sport drinks. Most of these closures are made from HDPE material. by Wolfgang von Schroeter