When Tetra Pak set about designing the Tetra Evero Aseptic – the first aseptic carton for milk - it wanted to create a package with the “opening and pouring functionality” of a bottle and the “environmental and operational efficiency” of a carton.
To achieve this, Tetra Pak was tasked with developing a plastic top that could fuse together the circular bottle opening and the cardboard sleeve. However according to Tetra Pak, existing injection moulding technology would have required large, slow, and expensive production units.
“Drawing on our experience we came up with a concept for injection moulding which could keep production costs down and production times up: reduce the size of the injection moulding equipment and integrate it into the filling machine itself, simplifying the process as much as possible,” said Tetra Pak.
According to the company, one injection moulding cycle takes 1.44 seconds – making it the fastest injection moulding system in the work, and the first integrated into the aseptic carton bottle filling machine.