| Specialist plastics packaging technology business Petainer (www.petainer.com) has Iaunched two new variants of its environmentally-friendly PET alternative to metal kegs for draught beverages. |
Supplied in rigid polypropylene casings, the new kegs are specifically designed to be filled on existing brewery filling lines that are now used for filling steel kegs. These are traditionally filled with the opening in the keg facing downwards and sealed onto the filling system.
Nigel Pritchard, group chief executive of Petainer, said: “The new keg variant offers brewers a lower overall cost opportunity to gain all the advantages of the Petainer Keg without needing to invest in new filling systems.
“It allows them to open up new channels and markets for their products and provides a step change in environmental performance. It will also reduce their costs and improve their cash flow. Once they have proven the concept and gained market penetration they can change to using the more competitive specialist filling systems.”
The benefits of Petainer Kegs compared with metal kegs include lower total costs of ownership, reduced environmental impact, new market opportunities and easier response to short-term peaks and troughs in demand.
There are potentially large savings in capital employed by eliminating the need to maintain a ‘fleet’ of metal kegs. This can release the substantial amount of money tied up in this ‘asset’ and end the constant expenditure on replacing damaged, lost or stolen kegs. In addition there is no need to maintain expensive tracking systems.
Key environmental benefits of Petainer Kegs include low material usage, compared to returnable metal kegs and other one-way kegs, and a lightweight construction which reduces supply chain environmental impacts.
Petainer Kegs and the polypropylene cases of the new versions are fully and easily recyclable, meeting all the essential requirements covered by EU regulations, including suitability for both mechanical and ‘energy from waste’ recycling.
In addition to these substantial benefits to breweries and fillers there are also real advantages to end users. One of the biggest benefits is the reduced storage space needed by the PET kegs. Securely storing empty metal kegs to prevent them being stolen before they are collected is a problem in many outlets. Petainer Kegs, once de-pressurised, can be easily crushed when they are empty and then put into the recycling bin with other recyclable plastics containers.
