Amcor PET Packaging has unveiled several new bottle designs that are created to meet goals for style and substance.
The designs — all of which will be commercially available by mid-2011 — are innovative while also providing cost savings for customers, custom beverage business development director Jeff DeLiberty said at the Packaging Conference in Las Vegas.
“These new types of custom packages try to maximize and push the limits of PET,” DeLiberty said.
Included among the new designs are:
* Arches, with bottles that use pillars and arches in their design. They can offer 22 percent total resin savings on 96-ounce bottles and 19 percent total resin savings on 64-ounce bottles.
* Active Hinge, a design using vertical and horizontal grooves, offering 2 percent resin savings on a 46-ounce bottle.
* CoFlex, producing a 20-ounce bottle using only 22 grams of PET, for resin savings of 42 percent.
Beyond 2011, Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Amcor PET is looking at designs such as Origami — with designs that resemble the Japanese art of paper folding — and Flat Fold, which can be crushed easily when emptied.
“Getting to lighter weights seems to be all the rage,” DeLiberty said. “If you don't provide lightweight solutions, you're going to fall through. We want to give marketers the most sustainable options in the marketplace today.”
“We have to maintain performance while using less resin, and maximize what customers are looking for,” he said.
Amcor also has taken public perception of lighter bottles into account when strategizing.
“A customer might not like the feel of the bottle, but when they're told it uses less plastics and consumes less natural resources, they change their attitude,” DeLiberty said. “Brand owners owe it to themselves to tell people what they're doing and why they're doing it.”
Amcor PET is a unit of Amcor Ltd. of Melbourne, Australia. The firm ranks as North America's second-largest blow molder with related annual sales estimated at $2 billion, according to a recent Plastics News ranking.
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