EDITOUR PETplanet Insider Vol. 23 No. 03/22 www.petpla.net 16 Tour Sponsors: has been specifically developed for attached closures. The thread diameter of the neck is just 26mm, down from 28mm of the PC 1881. This enables the tethered cap strength requirements and performance standards to be met while, at the same time, reducing the weight of the finish – often the single heaviest element in a PET bottle. It’s a step forward but its emergence, at the same time as the two years of the Covid pandemic, has led to a downturn in investment in new equipment. “We hit the beginning of the pandemic with the 1.9 g CSD closure. Under normal circumstances, that would have been quite an easy sell,” he continued. “If you’ve had the 2.1 g for the previous five years then, in the normal course of refurbishment, you would go for the lighter version – it would save a lot of money in raw materials. But the pandemic has led people to delay investing in new equipment and, probably, now to look to the GME 30/40.” Driving development However, the hiatus in investment has not impacted on UCL’s development activity; rather, the opposite. Enquiries have been coming in about tethering systems and the company itself has been looking to develop markets complementary to its historic heartland of CSD and waters. “Westfall Technik, our newest partner, is based in the USA. Our MD, Rod Druitt, is spending a lot of time over there right now,” Mark said. “They have an interest in broader areas of the market, including healthcare, personal care and homecare, as well as beverages. Our relationship with them means that we have had a lot more enquiries from sectors outside beverages than has been the case, historically. As a result, in terms of design activity, developing new closures and prototyping them we have been as busy as ever.” Opening new markets The fact that international travel has largely been out of the question means that UCL has hunkered down, take those enquiries and developed a whole new market. A lot of enquiries have enabled it to bring its beverage expertise to bear on liquids with different viscosities, developing resolutions through innovative technology, eliminating components and materials from caps and closures. “We were the first to design an effective cap that didn’t need a liner to create a seal on extrusion blow moulded bottles,” he continued. “Eliminating materials means reducing cost, cutting energy consumption, reducing waste and improving recyclability.” A lot of the package materials being used in homecare, healthcare and personal care are different – and processed differently – from CSD’s PET. Drink bottles are likely to be used fairly quickly; a large bottle of cleaning material is likely to be around for longer and to be treated more roughly, so the typical material is more likely to be HDPE. A single-stage extrusion blow-mould process, for example, will typically use a guillotine to cut the bottles away from the mould. This leads to a finish that is not even and smooth, like PET, but may feature a lot of flashing – dairy is another area where this is the case. UCL has designed a single-piece cap that incorporates a flexible blade within it, that can cope with the variations in neck finish and still maintain a full seal. Universal Closures’ Blade cap is designed to eliminate liners in closures for extrusion blow-moulded neck finishes. Sealing the deal: a new solution to eliminate liners “We created a seal, called a wedge seal, that looks a little bit like a liner. Its blades lie diagonally and, when they compress, they don’t form a complete, uniform line; they follow what a liner would do in the critical areas,” he explained. “If you think of a conventional liner, it’s a disc and, in fact, the bit in the middle is wasted. What our design does is to mimic the behaviour of a liner, in a blade. We designed that and worked closely with Z-Moulds to develop the tooling to allow the shape to be created and we had to do a lot of trials on the angle and with the ultimate client – a major producer of household goods – to prove the concept and demonstrate that it works, at scale.” Mark and UCL as a company believe that the new blade-seal cap has a great deal of potential, across the world and across several markets. UC’s ‘Eagle’ closure for the new GME 30.40 closure system standard for CSD
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTY0MjI=