Orlando, Fla. — Alpek Polyester USA LLC brought a new PET resin for bottle caps to NPE2024.
Global Commercial Vice President Alfredo Carrasco said the new material, marketed under the CaPETall brand name, "meets all the needs" of bottle cap production and now is being sampled by customers. The material is expected to be commercially available in 2025.
Officials added CaPETall is a 100 percent PET product that improves post-consumer PET bottle recycling and the PET circular economy.
CaPETall also maintains the advantages of PET's mechanical and performance properties and retains the desirable optical properties of PET. Additionally, it passes drop impact for both room-temperature and cold-temperature testing protocols.
"PET has a strong effect on sustainability," Carrasco said. "We want to differentiate PET vs. other plastics."
Alpek's Octal sheet unit also has developed DPET, a process that allows PET sheet to be made directly from PET melt resin. Officials said the process removes five energy-intensive stages from sheet production. DPET sheet also is available with recycled content.
The North American PET market remains oversupplied and continues to deal with low-priced imports from other countries, he said.
Earlier this year, Alpek closed its Cooper River PET resin plant in Charleston, S.C., in what officials said was "an effort to optimize" the firm's footprint. The 125-employee site was built in the early 1970s and has annual production capacity of about 375 million pounds, about 2 percent of Alpek's total assets.
Alpek also is a partner in Corpus Christi Polymers LLC, a joint venture that is building a major PET resin and feedstocks plant in Corpus Christi, Texas. Work on that project has been delayed several times and paused since September 2023.
Alpek Polyester has a U.S. office in Charlotte, N.C. The business is a unit of Alpek SAB de CV, an industrial conglomerate based in Monterrey, Mexico.