Nampak redesigns milk bottles to cut weight
Nampak Plastics has completed a two year redesign project on its HDPE milk bottles shaving off up to a fifth of their weight.
Nampak Plastics has completed a two year redesign project on its HDPE milk bottles shaving off up to a fifth of their weight.
The packaging supplier, which provides about 2 billion plastic bottles a year to the dairy industry, has unveiled the new Infini bottle.
Compared to the previous design, the new bottle offers an average weight saving across the one to four pint and two litre formats of 15 per cent. And the six-pint bottle promises a 21 per cent reduction in weight.
Nampak said the lightweighting was achieved thanks to a new octagonal structure that allows the walls of the bottle to be thinned.
James Crick, business development director at Nampak, explained how the lightweighting translates in carbon emission terms, in the context of the savings already made from the introduction of recycled content.
“A 10 per cent recycled HDPE content in the bottles already gives a 7 per cent carbon reduction. The lighter weight of Infini adds another 12 per cent carbon reduction to that, which will allow retailers to compensate for some other areas where the target reduction may be harder.”
Produced after a two-year development programme costing £1m, the new bottles are due to be released in the summer.
Nampak is also working to increase the recycled content of its HDPE bottles in line with UK government’s Milk Road Map that has set a target of 50 per cent for r-HDPE use by 2020.
In autumn last year, Nampak said it was planning an internal trial of 30 per cent recycled content bottles after a Bradford university study concluded that 50 per cent recycled content was a reasonable target.
Source: Nampak Plastics
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