PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2014

BOTTLE MAKING 22 PET planet insider Vol. 15 No. 10/14 www.petpla.net PET bottles extend milk shelf life and offer greater freedom in dairy packaging It is estimated that 34bn litres of milk and dairy drinks were packaged in Europe in 2013; only 8% of those packages were PET bottles. This market has been identified offering one of the highest potential growth opportunities for PET bottles in the coming years. HDPE (High Density Polyethyl- ene) bottles and cartons (often called ‘bricks’) have dominated the packag- ing of long life and extended shelf life milk for many years. Compared with their ‘clear glass’ forerunners these materials have proved successful, performing their primary functions of containing and protecting the milk during long storage and ambient dis- tribution, as well as preventing light damage. The instability of vitamins, par- ticularly B2 (riboflavin), B6 and B12, during processing and storage can contribute to losses in the nutritional quality of foods. Light, between 320nm – 520nm spectrum, has the effect of degrading these vitamins through photo oxidation, and they are essential for normal growth in the human body. In addition, the sec- ondary degradation of lipids through oxidation causes flavour deterioration, often referred to as creating a ‘light taste’. The balance that manufactur- ers need to achieve is to provide the required level of light protection while minimising cost, weight and material usage. Today’s PET market offers many options for providing a light barrier, including multilayer materials, the addition of colorants, or TiO 2 (titanium dioxide) additives dispersed directly during PET polymerisation. And it is embracing this last technology that GEA Procomac opted for the last of these options in ‘White & Safe’, its bottle for the UHT dairy market. The company partnered with PET Engi- neering and with Novapet for the bottle design, development and opti- misation. Its objective was to dem- onstrate that it is now possible to com- bine the highest level of hygiene and safety of aseptic filling, with packaging that provides a ‘total light barrier’ (over 99.5% of the visible light spectrum), together with guaranteed shelf life of over nine months for UHT milk. GEA Procomac claims that its bottle deliv- ers significant advantages over earlier materials. Barrier PET goes beyond flexible and modular light barrier func- tionality and offers the potential for light-weighting, in exactly way as ordi- nary PET, which will enable significant reduction of material costs along with the same bottle to bottle recyclability potential as normal PET. In 2007, in partnership with Nova- pet and Leche Pascual (now Calidad Pascual, Spain), the first PET bot- tles for UHT milk entered the market. Since then, many other important bottlers across Europe have chosen