An Innovation in Reduced Weight PET
27 Mar 2015 | KHS
This is our wires at the Enuga Food Tech in Cologne and I'm here with Christian Rommel from KHS and KHS are highlighting a new solution for where they can reduce the weight of a PT bottle from 22 g to 20 g.
Christian, can you explain a bit about the market demand for this type of innovation and what's behind it?
As milk is a very price sensitive market, we always challenged to improve the cost structures for our customers and the big.
The possibility to improve cost structure for a PT bottle is simply reduction in material, as material is 70% of the overall cost for a PT bottle, that's the biggest potential and that's the reason why we worked on it.
As you take out material, reduce weight on a PET bottle, you reduce the stability of the bottle, and we need to come along with this and find solutions to solve these weakening problems.
For this we have a powerful tool called bottles and shapes.
It's our service product to , support our customers by improving and developing PET bottles, and this tool we use to improve, typical milk bottle, 1 L, from 22 to 20 g down.
A known problem in the dairy market is when you fill your product at ambient temperature around 20 to 25 degrees and then store the product in the cool chain, reduce it down to 4 degrees, you will get some kind of vacuum inside the bottle.
Typically you can see this in the supermarket shelf with wobbling bottles.
It feels flimsy.
It's wobbling.
It's mainly not acceptable for end consumers.
Our solution or our idea was to come along with this by compensating the vacuum.
This, we developed a new kind of bottle, a new kind of bottle design and base.
We call it flip base and as you can see here, it's fully compensating the vacuum issue that you saw in the past.
Flip base system is a very innovative new base system that is able to compensate the vacuum by compensating the volume inside of the PUT bottle.
As you can see, it is able to move it's like a breathing bottle and compensating due to this the vacuum inside the PET bottle.
Is that system exclusive to this type of reduced waste bottle, or is it also used on some of your other applications?
It could also be used for other applications.
It's prepared to compensate for this kind of vacuum that you get when filling at ambient temperatures and cooling it down to the fridge.
So for example, filling flat water at ambient temperatures and then sell it in a cool chain, sell it in the fridge, you have exactly the same problem, but this could also be solved with this technology.
Could you give a little bit more detail about how you optimize the process so that you reduce the PET content?
So we are looking back and forth 40 years of PET experience.
We are the redel and pioneers of PET bottling and taking all these experts into a group and working on bottle designs.
We have a lot of powerful tools like computer simulations and a equipped lab area.
Our facility in Hamburg and using all these tools we have been able to reduce the bottle weight down to this level.
Do you think you can go any further?
Do you think you can go any further?
Is there still room for improvement?
We are already at a very low limit.
Maybe there are some additional potentials in the future, but thinking about new ideas for the thread, taking out material out of the thread, and we could also reduce some additional weight.
Christian, thank you very much.
You wake up.
