EDITOUR PETplanet Insider Vol. 22 No. 10/21 www.petpla.net 13 Mr Thomas Schmidt, Group Marketing Director at Bericap Holding GmbH 1) As with most other businesses, the pandemic has of course impacted our daily way of working internally as well as with our business partners. From a business point of view, we were facing opposite developments in demands resulting from different consumer and customer behaviours: whereas the out-of-home related smaller volume beverages segment collapsed, the demands from hygiene and food sectors by far exceeded the production capacities. We have already experienced a return towards pre-pandemic levels over the last months but only the future can tell us to what extend the pandemic has changed consumer behaviour and market segments in the long term. 2) For Bericap, as one of the leading manufacturers of caps and closures for the beverage, food and industrial sectors, the EU single use plastic directive 2019/904 (SUP) defi nitely has the highest impact. The conversion of the European beverage industry to tethered caps by 2024 is truly a challenge; starting from technical product requirements and consumer preferences via closure production, testing, approvals and equipment, scaling up to customer fi lling line trials, approvals and market introductions. Besides several approved solutions on hand, we see that our ClipAside tethered cap offers the most robust and consistent per formance across all relevant neck fi nishes with minimum changeover cost for our customers. A key argument for many of our customers is the fl exibility that the slitted TE band offers to their tethered cap project. Our customers can start preparing and testing their lines today based on a tethered cap shell with standard TE band, and once they are ready with their market preparations it is only a change of the slitting geometry with no impact to the prepared lines. 3) Several studies prove the signifi cant environmental advantages that the PET bottle offers compared to potential alternative materials especially when kept in the recycling loop. Some of the major future challenges go beyond the PET industry’s immediate scope, such as a necessary shift in the political, public and consumer opinions and establishing the appropriate infrastructures, certifi cations and re-collection behaviours across the world. The immediate challenges of the PET and related industries are to optimise PET and rPET materials (usage of rPET and PCR material), designs (e.g. light weighting), processes and technologies (e.g. chemical recycling) which further improve the usage and recycling of the PET / PE materials. www.bericap.com
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