PET Bottle Rightweighting Able to Save Millions of Dollars a Year in Africa

Sidel has announced a new initiative aimed at reducing the amount of PET used in beverage bottles worldwide, thereby helping producers to save money and improve their environmental footprint at the same time. To allow beverage producers and bottlers to calculate for themselves what savings could be achieved based on their own production parameters, Sidel has introduced an online PET savings calculator.

"The benefits of lightweighting PET bottles are well known in the beverage industry. However many producers are still not taking advantage of innovative new bottle designs that could help them make substantial cost savings," says Clive Smith, Zone Vice-President for the Middle East and Africa at Sidel. "According to our calculations there remains a great opportunity for the beverage industry to reduce raw material usage, save costs and improve environmental footprints by adopting new bottle designs, especially for water and carbonated soft drinks (CSD). Furthermore, these modern designs are often only subtle appearance variations of existing designs that can easily be applied to existing production lines with no difference to the end consumer experience."

In the past 18 months Sidel has launched several bottle design innovations, including its RightWeight™ bottle concept, which can be applied across categories, and its range of Sidel StarLite™ bottle bases for water and CSD. RightWeight is the proprietary bottle design process that Sidel uses to ensure a bottle is both light while also strong enough to survive global supply chains, look good at the point of sale and offer a great consumer experience.

Calculated savings
Modern bottle designs can lead to substantial savings for beverage producers worldwide. To make it as easy as possible to see the actual savings that can be achieved, Sidel has now launched a PET savings calculator, available at www.sidel.com/PET-savings-calculator. This enables water and CSD producers to easily calculate how much they could save by utilising a Sidel StarLite base and a shorter neck. The calculator allows producers to enter their current production conditions for water or CSD products, such as current bottle neck format, raw material costs, annual production hours and blower speed etc. for a range of bottle formats. It then immediately calculates how much money could be saved per line by simply adapting the bottle design to use the Sidel StarLite base and shorter neck.

According to Sidel data, globally, the average line can save between USD 300,000 and USD 1 million, with faster lines or larger bottle formats capable of saving even more. This leads to an approximate average saving per bottle of up to 0.005 dollars per 0.5 litre bottle or 0.007 dollars per 2 litre bottle for still water, and 0.005 dollars per 0.5 litre bottle or 0.006 dollars per 2 litre bottle for CSD.
According to Euromonitor forecasts for 2014-2018, released in March 2014, 216 billion PET bottles for still water and 116 billion PET bottles for CSD will have been produced by the end of the year. Assuming a minimum saving of 0.005 dollars for all those bottles, the beverage industry as a whole could save 1.08 billion dollars for water and 580 dollars for CSD.

In total this equates to over USD 1.66 billion potential cost savings for the beverage industry from water and CSD alone on a global scale. This does not include other categories such as juices, liquid dairy products and other products.

Commenting on this, Samuel Gobbe, Service Director, Sidel GMEA, stated - "We did the calculation exercise to show the potential that RightWeighting provides globally. However, we also recognised the value of producers being able to find out the specific savings that they can achieve and have therefore introduced the packaging calculator to enable them to do so."