Ashley Jones, MD, PACCOR UK, said the company has invested a significant amount of resources over the last year at its Mansfield, UK plant to design, test and roll out the continuous compression moulded (CCM) caps.
Müller
Since re-launching the dairy closure, where the original weight was 2.2g, the total reduction has been 41%. The applied changes in knurling design contribute also to reduce the required force to open a container by an end user.
“Currently 70% of the tooling capacity has been converted to run Stealth with the project continuing until all have been converted,” said Jones.
“There will be further scientific work commissioned once this total market conversion has been completed, however PACCOR’s Design Team has already begun conceptual work on the next-generation of this closure.”
Companies that have already signed up to the caps include Müller which rolled it out across its own-brand and private label fresh milk products from February 2019.
Müller’s HDPE fresh milk bottles are already 100% recyclable and the business wants to increase the use of recycled plastic in its bottles to 50% by 2020.
Cream-pots
The dairy company has already completed various acquisitions throughout the UK that allows the business to manufacture its own fresh milk bottles in the UK.
Due to the success of the caps, PACCOR UK has begun to apply similar design principles and technology to conceptual injection moulded cream-pots on its IML product range.
Juergen Lehmann, sales director international, PACCOR, added, as a result, PACCOR (Mansfield) UK will reduce plastic usage on a much bigger scale without compromising the performance of its products.
“The 13% reduction in weight of each cap will equate to approximately 600 tons of plastic used in the company’s production thanks to PACCOR’s production capacity of 3 billion caps every year,” he said.