PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2017

imprint EDITORIAL PUBLISHER Alexander Büchler, Managing Director HEAD OFFICE heidelberg business media GmbH Bunsenstr. 14 69115 Heidelberg, Germany phone: +49 6221-65108-0 fax: +49 6221-65108-28 info@hbmedia.net EDITORIAL Kay Barton Heike Fischer Gabriele Kosmehl Michael Maruschke Ruari McCallion Waldemar Schmitke Anthony Withers WikiPETia.info petplanet@hbmedia.net MEDIA CONSULTANTS Martina Hirschmann hirschmann@hbmedia.net Johann Lange-Brock lange-brock@hbmedia.net phone: +49 6221-65108-0 fax: +49 6221-65108-28 LAYOUT AND PREPRESS EXPRIM Werbeagentur Matthias Gaumann | www.exprim.de READER SERVICES Till Kretner reader@hbmedia.net PRINT Chroma Druck & Verlag GmbH Werkstr. 25 67354 Römerberg Germany WWW www.hbmedia.net | w ww.petpla.net PETplanet Insider ISSN 1438-9459 is published 10 times a year. This publication is sent to qualified subscribers (1-year subscription 149 EUR, 2-year subscription 289 EUR, Young professionals’ sub- scription 99 EUR. Magazines will be dispatched to you by airmail). Not to be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. Note: The fact that product names may not be identified as trademarks is not an indication that such names are not registered trademarks. 3 PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 10/17 www.petpla.net How often have we thought that no more bottle weight can possibly be saved? Not very. The first generation of weight saving solutions was brought about by cap designers. Easy to secure CSD and water closures, together with much lighter neck geometries, are now well established on the market. The second weight saving generation was on the bottom, regardless of whether the bottom of the preforms was trapezoidal instead of hemispheri- cal or ring-shaped, which led to a significantly slimmed down preform. In the meantime, there have been ever increasing technological attempts to reduce wall thickness which have resulted in pouch-like bottles. These are only favoured by consumers in a few regions and then only at the lowest end of the price range. We saw the third generation of weight saving bottles at this year’s Drinktec trade fair in Munich, in particular wall thickness distri- bution in the main body of the bottle. Aventics suggested a controlled, pre-blowed compressed air system to ensure the preform was perfectly pre-stretched according to the bottle’s geometry. The result is that a little more material can be put into the wall from the shoulder and the bottom region, thus saving weight. Mint, Otto Hof- stetter and Netstal suggested a new neck geometry below the neck ring which reduced the bottle’s wall thickness. There are small webs on the circumfer- ence to ensure the injection-moulded neck area is correctly formed. KHS and Husky adjusted the preform and stretch blow-moulding process to ensure that a 5 gram bottle could hold 500ml. However, it was Sidel who showed how 2-5% of material could be saved. Laser diodes of around 1,000nm are used in the SBM heating sec- tion. This allows the preforms to be individually heated in more than 20 finely layered zones. This enables a lot of material to be stretched into the bottle wall when blowing from the shoulder and the bottom region. Sidel demonstrated just how flexible the new process can be by stretch-blowing a wine glass at Drinktec 2017. Common to all the 3G processes is the fact that they have not yet been fully adopted for volume production by the customer. We will cover this in greater detail in the next issue. Yours, Alexander Büchler Dear friends of PETplaner Insider, Third Weight Reduction Generation F.l.t.r.: Heike Fischer, PETplanet Insider, Vincent Le Guen, VP Packaging at Sidel and Alexander Büchler, PETplanet Insider