Lightweighting carbonated soft drinks bottles
- Date
- 10 Jan 2007
- Documents
-
Report: Esterform lightweight PET bottles
(771 kb)
CS: Esterform lightweight PET bottles
(150 kb)
Raising the bar in PET bottle lightweighting
WRAP worked with Esterform Packaging to reduce the weight of PET used in two specific bottles to set a new Best in Class standard for major beverage fillers supplying UK supermarkets:
- a 500 ml bottle used by Radnor Hills; and
- a 2 litre bottle used by a major carbonated soft drinks manufacturer
510,000 tonnes of plastic bottles enter the UK waste stream each year, so the potential benefits of lightweighting are huge.
The project showed there was potential to reduce the weight of the 500 ml bottle from 25g to 20g and the 2 litre bottle from 42g to 40g.
If these new Best in Class bottle weights were adopted across the UK carbonated soft drinks industry for these bottle sizes, this would result in a saving of 3,400 tonnes of PET. This would generate a material cost saving of £2.7m and an energy saving of 2,811 million kWh.
We would encourage others across the industry to take up the findings of this research. More details on this project can be found in the full technical report.
