Sidel has introduced an online PET savings calculator that allows beverage producers and bottlers to calculate the savings they could achieve based on their production parameters.
“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 Vincent Le Guen, vice president of packaging.
“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.”
Calculated savings
The calculator enables water and CSD producers to easily calculate how much they could save by utilizing a Sidel StarLite base and a shorter neck.
Producers can 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 for a range of bottle formats into the calculator.
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, the average line can save between €250,000 (US$311,728) and €850,000, with faster lines or larger bottle formats capable of saving even more.
This leads to an approximate average saving per bottle of up to €0.004 per 0.5L bottle or €0.006 per 2L bottle for still water, and €0.004 per 0.5L bottle or €0.005 per 2L bottle for CSD.
In March 2014, Euromonitor forecasts 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 €0.004 for all those bottles, the beverage industry as a whole could save €864 million for water and €464 million for CSD.
In total this equates to more than €1.3 billion potential cost savings for the beverage industry from water and CSD.
This does not include other categories such as juices, liquid dairy products and even beer.
