Silgan also produces the plastic flip-top dispensing closures.
• Nissei ASB Co. of Smyrna, Ga., won the beverage award in packaging for a returnable 5-gallon polycarbonate water container with a hollow handle called the TruHandle, for home and office use.
TruHandle is injection stretch blow molded on Nissei ASB machines. The injected neck finish had no base weld, giving improved impact resistance, the company said. No top or tail flash gives a significantly better visual look that extrusion blow molding.
Nissei ASB made the mold.
• Bekum America Corp. of Williamston, Mich., picked up the "other" category in packaging for an ecobottle for Ecological Brands Inc., known for its bottles made of 100 percent recycled cardboard and newspapers, with a thin-wall blow molded liner made from post-consumer HDPE from Envision Plastics.
The molded-fiber shell provides the structure, so the blow molded liner, which only needs to provide barrier and closure features to protect the contents, uses 60 percent less plastic than rigid blow molded bottles. Patented blow molded features in the liner neck interface have mating features in the thermoformed fiber outer shells. That provides a reclosable bottle without the need for lamination or adhesives.
The toolmaker is M.C. Molds Inc.
• Mann+Hummel USA Inc., based in Portage, Mich., won the awards for both automotive/transportation in the industrial category and the division award for a blow molded clean air duct assembly for the Ford F150 truck. The assembly of parts, most of them blow molded, carries air from the air filter box to two turbo inlets. The main blow molded components integrate silencers and air connections used to activate and control critical functions such as crankcase ventilation and evaporative emissions. The plastic overmolding seals the silencer assembly.
Mann+Hummel uses double-cavity molds to handle the production volume of more than 750,000 units a year.
The mold maker is PT Tech.