PETpla.net Insider 11 / 2016

PACKAGING 28 PET planet Insider Vol. 17 No. 11/16 www.petpla.net To kill two birds with one stone In the beverage sector, the packaging industry has to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, consumers expect individually designed packages, if possible with supplementary functions. And secondly, increasingly eco-minded drinks consumers are showing a growing thirst for resource-conserving contain- ers manufactured with environmentally compatible methods. The industry achieves this balancing act with new packaging strategies and efficient production equipment. For example, the mineral water brand evian, which is owned by Danone Waters, goes to huge lengths to highlight the uniqueness of its prod- ucts. For its prestigious plastic bottles, it exploits the new Nature MultiPack technology, a packaging innovation that uses specialised adhesives to join the individual PET bottles together in such a way that they can be individu- ally positioned and later released from the others with ease. (See PETplanet 4/2016 page 34) In the design field, Danone is also going unusual ways. Since 2008, evian has issued nine Limited Editions of mineral water bottles styled by well-known fashion designers. In 2016, the American couturier Alexander Wang has taken up the barcode as a package theme and rendered it with black-and-white stripes on the glass bottles. The spaces between the stripes and the purist design are intended to express evian’s natural purity. But individuality and differentiation are highly popular not only among upmarket brands, as a growing throng of drinks manu- facturers are marketing their mineral water and lemonade additionally in smaller, 0.5l returnable bottles to appeal to smaller households. Or they sell their product in elegant faceted bottles to improve their chances of selection by high-class restaurants, for example. The benefits notwithstand- ing, lavish packages do have their drawbacks. The greater the individuality and complexity of the product’s packaging, the more elaborate and expensive is its production. The higher production costs are ultimately passed on to the customer in higher prices – a point that consumer activists often criticise. What is more, elaborate production methods and disposable bottles burden the environment. To minimise the impact, some countries have set in some cases ambitious targets for bottle reuse. Germany, for exam- ple, wants to achieve an 80% reuse rate, although this has fallen since 2004 from two thirds to 45%. At the same time, the quan- tity of waste from one- way drinks packages has since increased by 30%. According to current statistics from the German Federal Government, package consumption rose from roughly 465,000t to 600,300t in 2014. Retail- ers and manufacturers are regarded as the instigators of this single- use boom. Packaging manufacturers are also under an obligation. They have to achieve the balancing act of spec- tacularly presenting the package with a consumer-friendly design while conserving raw materials and thus easing the burden on the environment. The requirements that have to be met by packaging machines are there- fore becoming more exacting as well. “Treating natural resources responsibly and doing business in an environment- friendly way have high priority among manufacturers of food processing machines and packaging machines. They know that sustainable produc- tion processes are hugely important for their customers,” says Vera Fritsche, expert at the VDMA (Mechanical Engi- neering Industry Association) asso- ciation for food processing machines and packaging machines. Intelligent control and automation technol- ogy and energy-saving drives, compressors, fans and pumps rank, she claims, rank among the classic solutions for saving power and other resources and boosting energy efficiency. Effi- cient motors perfectly adapted to the machine’s motions and acceleration processes reduce power consumption. In addi- tion, Fritsche continues, innovative and improved pro- cesses lower the consump- tion of energy and water while innovative machine strategies extend service and maintenance intervals and service life and thus save energy. Innovation potential in production All the same, big potential for cost sav- ings can be found not only in the materi- als sector, but also in production equipment. Industry is therefore doing all it can to improve production methods. An example of this is the Doğuş Çay tea factory in Izmir The heater boxes are distinguished by new reflectors made of modern ceram- ics and a precisely adjusted geometry.