BOTTLE MAKING 16 PETplanet Insider Vol. 26 No. 04/25 www.petpla.net Cypet Technologies claims big savings for extra large containers The bigger the better – and lighter by Ruari McCallion Cypet Technologies, which is located near Nicosia, Cyprus, has made a speciality of designing and manufacturing large capacity PET containers. Later in 2025 it will be launching a 1,000 l container in partnership with a company in South Asia, and a similar sized Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC). We spoke to Michalis Sideris, the company’s Business and Technical Development Director. Cypet Technologies was established in 2013 by Michalis Sideris’ father, Constantinos Sideris, who had a chemical engineering background and many years’ experience in the plastics industry; he had been running a trading company in Cyprus. It now employs 25 people at its Nicosia HQ and an additional 15 people at its facility in India. Innovative design was a strength from the start. As a start-up, the company was not in a position to take on the established and global businesses, whose scale of operations meant that it was impossible to compete in the mainstream market on price or, realistically, on technology. But Mr Sideris Senior had a clear vision of where he wanted the business to be: in larger-sized containers. He was also in possession of a patented process to make such containers through single-stage injection stretch blow-moulding, which – he maintained – would save operators time, material and energy. As these are the three factors that are most likely to push up costs, the Sideris family and Cypet Technologies believed they were on to a winner – and so it has proved. Cypet has established itself in its niche with a combination of innovation and demonstrable cost saving technologies. Simpler, cheaper – and larger “Our machinery uses a single clamping unit to open and close the injection mould and to blow them but it was the layout of the two moulds inside the machine that was a novel innovation,” Michalis said. “When we developed that first machine, we thought that the main benefit would be a simpler and cheaper machine. We subsequently found that our machine was capable of making much larger containers than were available at the time. Back then, the maximum container size that could be blown was 30 l, which is a popular beer keg size. The Cypet machines were capable of going up to 120 l blow-moulded containers, which was demonstrated via a live production demo at the 2019 K’ Show.” This capability took Cypet well into areas that were traditionally dominated by HDPE, although its mission was, initially, to drive the market to PET containers as a more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional materials. Sustainability “PET is the most sustainable plastic packaging available. It is recyclable indefinitely and another way of making it sustainable is to produce your plastic packaging using the lowest amount of energy possible. These two factors were the main motivation for establishing Cypet,” Michalis explained. Cypet also saw that the ISBM market was ripe for disruption, with two Japanese companies dominating the market. As a start-up, it took some time to convince potential customers that its innovations were going to deliver their promises but it has now, while remaining a niche player, established itself as a serious contender, with customers in 20 countries on all five continents. And it was customers themselves who identified the potential for the Cypet technology. “By the time we reached machine number three, we were already blow-moulding 50 l beer kegs for a specific application in Australia. It was the market that guided us into looking at larger containers,” he explained. F.l.t.r.: Michalis Sideris, Head of Business and Technical Development, and Constantinos Sideris, Director & General Manager at Cypet Technologies Preform for a 1,000 l PET water container
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