PETpla.net Insider 05 / 2015

BOTTLE MAKING 22 PET planet insider Vol. 16 No. 05/15 www.petpla.net Specialist custom blow moulder by Alexander Büchler For Monarch Plastics, Brampton, Canada, the customer’s requirements are always unique. They view every PET bottle as a new challenge. The latest highlight is a stretch blow- moulded, pasteurisable wide mouth container with injected neck for Maraschino cherries, complete with a standard tin-plate twist-off lid for glass containers. David Lewis, Director of Engineering at Monarch, is rather proud of this development- which is unique worldwide. The PET sector is handled by Fayyaz Khan. He produces preforms under the Globalforms brand name. Both companies belong to The Monarch Group with two plants in Canada and one plant in United States. In fact, pasteurising represents new territory for the company. For a number of years they have been producing containers from polyole- fins. Their main customer here is S.C. Johnson. Target markets include the Personal Care, Home Care, Hair Care, Automotive, Food, Promotional and Pharmaceutical Industries. However, over the last few years, PET has become more widespread alongside the traditional blow mould- ing business. Initially containers were stretch blow moulded on Amsler and Automa and preforms for in-house use on Huarong - Taiwanese lines. Since then, three Sipa stretch blow moulders have joined a Husky Hypet 225 preform injection machine. Globalforms produces special neck finish preforms for variety of bottles and standard preforms for hot fill bot- tles. The new Maraschino cherries project is running on two Aoki SBIII- 500-150 lines with seven cavities each. Each project is not only a tech- nological challenge for the Monarch team, it is also a logistical one. The customer may well come up with an idea, but that is no guide as to how the product will ultimately be received by the market. In such cases Monarch adopts a multilevel approach. In the case of the pill bottles project, Mon- arch initially produced stretch blow moulded containers from blow/trim neck in PET. The 250cc size bottle weighed 27g. With this the customer was able to conquer the market. As a second step they switched over to stretch blow moulding in PET with injected neck using a preform pro- duced by Globalforms. The bottle looks the same from the outside but weighs a mere 17g. In total just under 400mill. contain- ers leave the plant each year. The new cherry project means that some 50mill. of these are PET containers. This brings us back to the contain- ers. The cherries are bottled warm in the containers, sealed with the The Aoki line with 7 cavities with adjacent palletising for the cherry project.