How does Sidel view the issue around PET?

How would the company development possibly have gone without the introduction of PET technology?

Le Guen: This is, of course, a highly speculative question. We can really only say that PVC was at the end of its cycle. We saw low performances, e.g. PVC was not suitable for carbonated drinks; it is not recyclable and even harmful to the environment. This was why we started to investigate business opportunities into other packaging materials, i.e. PET, which was already in the market but not for food-related applications.

 

As one of the pioneers of the PET packaging industry, Sidel believed in the potential of PET back in the 1970s. How did you describe and quantify the potential of PET at that time?

Le Guen: Back in the 1970s, we couldn’t ignore that the growth of Carbonated Soft Drinks (CSD) was not properly addressed by glass and other plastics. In the following decade, we launched various innovative blowing technologies in close cooperation with customers in the United States, the most dynamic market in terms of PET adoption at that moment in time.

 

How could you describe the dominance of glass and can in the years 1960-75 and what shaped the competition between these packaging materials? What were weaknesses of these packaging materials? Which critical points did these types of packaging offer compared to PET - and are these points still valid today?

Le Guen: We have to remember that back in the 60s and 70s, there were simply no packaging options for large size containers: glass was simply not viable due to the high risks for explosion associated with carbonation and familysize bottles. Therefore, PET took up speed quickly as an alternative, based on its safety and its resistance to breakages. That said, glass has some other weaknesses, such as its heavy weight and the central manufacturing. Cans, on the other hand, are much lighter than glass and are fully recyclable but they had the disadvantages of needing a lot of energy during production and not being re-sealable. Originally, PET entered the carbonated soft drinks markets because of its resistance to pressure and its 20-fold weight reduction compared to glass, thus becoming an enabler for market expansion around this beverage segment, successfully winning in terms of safety, cost affordability, convenience and transport challenges. Talking still beverages, PVC was giving the same lightweight advantage compared to glass, but was taken over by PET thanks to PET’s 100% recyclability potential, with the main outlet being fibre application and other non-food applications. The above points still remain completely valid today.

Which developments originated from the demands of the consumers, which from Sidel’s own ideas?

Le Guen: Heat-resistant blowing and preferential heating developments were clearly driven by customer needs. When it comes to aseptic PET packaging the bottlers required more and more simple and safe solutions and Sidel was able to innovate through the Predis system, our proven dry preform sterilisation technology. The Predis differs from other aseptic bottling technologies because the PET package sterilisation already takes place at the preform rather than during the bottling phase. Thus, the solution marks an important step towards a sustainable production because it does not require any water and uses only minimal amounts of chemicals: all of that while eliminating the constraints related to the bottle shape’s complexity and exploiting PET lightweighting opportunities. The solution is able to handle bottle formats from 200 ml to 3 L with any shape, at speeds up to 60,000 bottles per hour.

 

What has driven the industry for the past 15-20 years? And what drove it in the beginning of the PET industry?

Le Guen: The main driver of the industry has always been productivity, based on increasing output speeds and packaging lightweighting opportunities. For example, in 1990, a 500 ml bottle for still water weighed 19 g and was produced with 34 bars of blowing pressure. This required 6.3 watt-hours per bottle, with an output speed of 1,000 bottles per hour. 30 years later, with Sidel’s X-LITE Still, the output speed has increased by 170% to 2,700 bottles per hour at only 6.5 g of bottle weight. Additionally, energy needs have decreased by 50%, down to 17 bars of blowing pressure and 2.3 watt-hours/bottle.

 

What are today's challenges in the packaging market? Which advantages and disadvantages does PET have here?

Gimre: Talking challenges, it would be naive not to recognise that we are living in an era when plastics is perceived as a contributor to pollution and PET bottles can be found in marine litter. The biggest issue today is public perception, which is largely based on misconceptions and driven by emotions. Note that PET represents only 5% of the global plastic production. Despite the fact that PET is the best packaging material in terms of environmental impact, on top of the many other advantages it offers, such as food safety, lightweighting potential, design flexibility, transparency, affordability, we acknowledge that education of the end consumers on the full supply chain and better management of waste are key success factors for a true circular economy of plastics.

 

How would you describe the market in terms of sustainability in the early days?

Le Guen: The notion of sustainability, or more precisely “sustainable development”, was kicked off between the late 80s and the early 90s; one of the main founding acts being the Brudtland commission report for the United Nations. The environmental toolkit with the ISO 14000 series on environmental management, Life Cycle Analysis tools, etc. developed very fast in that period. We can say that from the early 2000s, sustainability took off in most of the business organisations, becoming a clear customer and consumer focus. From the very beginning, in the food and beverage industry, PET as a packaging material already bore significant advantages versus aluminum cans and glass in terms of sustainability. Glass factories were and still are huge fossil resource consumers. In addition, glass bottle production has to be centralised, therefore generating huge CO2 emissions linked to the transportation of the heavy bottles. Aluminum cans, although they are light, have similar issues when it comes to energy consumption: aluminum production plants have to be close to power plants and can manufacturing is too complex to be implemented in a filling plant, generating the need for transportation, coming along with additional costs and a bigger impact on the environment. The sustainability attributes of PET greatly helped it to develop fast. In other words, the sustainability attributes of PET greatly helped it to develop fast. Besides that, as mentioned, they were a determining factor in the conversion of bottled water from PVC to PET.

 

When did the subject of PET recycling come up? When was it discussed for food grade?

Le Guen: PET recycling has been developing in parallel with the increasing use of this packaging material as a preferred solution in the beverage industry. In the early 80s, the polyester fiber market was starving for recycled PET and companies such as Wellman jumped into the business of bottle-tofiber recycling. A few years later, in the late 80s, Plastipak founded Cleantech to recycle HDPE as well as PET containers.

 

''The main technical challenges at the beginning were two-fold: for one, the bottle stability was an issue.'' - Vincent Le Guen

 

In the non-food sector, Colgate has been using recycled PET for a long time, benefitting from a lower resin cost. Actually, a number of visionaries understood that recycling and protecting the environment was key to packaging. For instance, about 25 years ago, Antoine Riboud, founder and former CEO of Danone, understood that the benefits of single use packaging could only work if a strong cooperation across the value chain was established in parallel to avoid plastic pollution, therefore contributing to the launch of Eco-Emballages (nowadays CITEO) in France. The use of recycled PET into food containers started with multilayer technology and was led in the early days by Continental PET Technologies, a company now owned by Graham Packaging. Recycled PET was integrated as a middle layer of the preform, ensuring a functional barrier. Developments for direct food contact PET recycling started in the US in the early 90s, with the FDA issuing a letter of non-objection around the Supercycle process. In Europe, a common process for food contact approval was established only in 2008, under the guidance of EFSA, allowing a faster development of bottle-to-bottle recycling. Last but not least: chemical recycling was already part of the agenda in the 90s, but the business case wasn’t there.

 

What significance did PET recycling have and what technical developments did it trigger?

Le Guen: Let’s talk about the challenges ahead. Nowadays, the demand for food grade r-PET is so high that r-PET is sold at higher prices than virgin PET. On the other hand, we need both an acceptable quantity and quality to implement improvements and increase the level of automatisation of the sorting technologies. We expect this to continue in the coming years, but at the cost of efficiency, and eventually resulting in lower profitability. Improved quality of the collected PET material looks as a more sound and sustainable solution. It can be achieved through effective design to recycle and by strengthening collection methods and streams. On the latter set of measures, reverse vending machines via separate streams, deposit schemes, as well as financial incentives, have proven to be the most efficient ones. Chemical recycling is often proposed as an alternative mean to obtain higher quality recycled material. Without digging into the various processes, we could say yes – in principle. However, the quality of the incoming material will impact the efficiency of these recycling processes, too. In essence, quality collection remains key.

 

Consider the CO2 footprint using the example of a 0.5 L water bottle: How did the PET bottle perform in 1990 and how in 2020? How will this look in 2025? Are there any comparisons with glass and cardboard packaging?

Le Guen: I would like to use a real life example, comparing our X-LITE Still bottle solution – designed for nonpressurised water bottled in PET, a 500 ml format, 6.5 g – with a regular 500 ml PET bottle, weighing about 12g. Electricity saving per bottle equals 4 Wh, translating to a reduction of carbon footprint per bottle comparable to 1.2 g eq. CO2./1/  When comparing glass to PET in terms of their respective production processes, we have to consider both the eco profiles of the materials and the weight of the packaging for the same functional unit. For instance, to produce one kilogram of PET, the energy involved is 69 MJ/kg: this means that for a 0.5 l, 12 g bottle the energy impact will be 828 joules per bottle. On the other hand, to produce one kilogram of glass, the energy needed is at 16.6 MJ/kg, meaning that for 0.5 l, weighing between 200 and 300 g, the energy impact will be ranging from 3,320 joules to 4,980 joules per bottle.  For both materials, the rule is: the higher the recycling rate, the lower the carbon footprint. This phenomenon is more significant for PET than for glass. In glass production, whatever the recycling rate, you still need to melt it at 1,600°C and the main, yet slight, improvement is on the yield of the oven. With recycled PET, the many steps starting from extraction of fossil resources to the production of the polymer are avoided, leading to a major reduction of energy use and carbon footprint. In Europe, the typical carbon footprint of virgin PET is 2.15 kg CO2 equivalent/kg. It drops down to 0.45 kg CO2 eq./kg with 100% mechanically recycled PET. Secondly, we can also compare the carbon footprint linked to the whole lifecycle of refillable glass and refillable PET. The following projection considers a 500 ml bottle format, for CSD, in Europe, and is taking into account both today’s collection rates and a hypothetical future with 90% collection rates. Currently, a refillable PET bottle, weighing 48 g, only has 78.4% of the carbon footprint that a one-way 500 ml PET bottle has. In comparison, a refillable glass bottle has a 21.2% ‘worse’ carbon footprint than our one-way 500 ml PET reference bottle. Even in our hypothetical future with a 95% return rate for refillable bottles, 7 years life time of a bottle with 3 trips/ year of 500 km, the refillable glass bottle still performs approximately 17% ‘worse’ than a one-way 500 ml PET bottle today, and much worse than the refillable PET bottle in this hypothetical future./2/ This means that refillable glass is only convenient when the distance between the production plant and the retailer, i.e. the distribution point, is short; otherwise, PET packaging performs much better in terms of the CO2 footprint. We expect the lightweighting of a PET bottle to be determined by consumer acceptance. However, the container will integrate more and more recycled content, from an average of 10%, which is the status quo today in Europe, to a value ranging from 30% (in Europe by 2030) to 50%, depending on the development of collection and recycling capacity. With 30% to 50% recycled content, even if bottle weights would not be reduced, an estimated Green House Gases (GHG) saving, ranging from 6 to 11 g eq. CO2 per bottle, would be possible./3/  As mentioned above, there is typically a gap between public perception on what the best environmental packaging solution is and what the reality is. We are expecting some changes in consumers’ attitude towards packaging. What will happen in the near future will depend on the alternatives that are available on the market, how they are perceived as environmentally friendly, convenient and affordable.

 

What are the developments to become even more sustainable? How are they communicated to the consumer?

Gimre: Sidel has always been working along the ideas of the circular economy but expectations recently evolved. Originally, one of the main drivers behind the conversion from PVC to PET was the latter’s 100% recyclability potential, with the main outlet being fibre application and other non-food applications. Today, closing the loop via food grade bottleto-bottle mechanical recycling is gaining real traction.In our daily work, we strive to avoid all waste, minimise greenhouse gas emissions, cut water and energy c onsumption, and promote recyclability. Additionally, as part of our End to End approach, we look at packaging and equipment with a 360° perspective. Not only do we need to take into account primary, secondary and tertiary packaging but also their interaction with the equipment in the factory. Moreover, we need to consider the impacts they create upstream and downstream in the value chain. Lastly, by signing the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, we have undertaken another important step towards a more sustainable future. This worldwide initiative was launched by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and UN Environment in October 2018 with the goal of addressing the plastic waste and pollution crisis at its source and keeping plastics within the economy. Today, it unites more than 400 organisations on its common vision of a circular economy for plastics. Obviously, all our customers have set aggressive goals around circular economy commitments. Several companies stepped up in 2018: in October, French multinational Danone pledged to produce 100 percent circular packaging by 2025.

 

''Today, closing the loop via food grade bottle-to-bottle mechanical recycling is gaining real traction.'' - Monica Gimre

 

Around 86 percent of the company’s packaging is already circular, and half of its water volumes are sold in reusable packaging. /4/ Coca-Cola pledged to collect and recycle 100 percent of its beverage packaging by 2030./5/ Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, made a similar commitment last year, pledging to make all of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025./6/ Earlier this year, PepsiCo launched “Recycling with Purpose”, a circular economy model that will promote recycling in Latin America and the Caribbean. One of Recycling with Purpose’s three main components is a consumer incentive approach that helps educate and involve consumers in recycling.

 

Can patents be an indicator  on how the main focus around  blow molding machines has shifted?

Le Guen: The PET blow moulding business is a rather young business where we still see a lot of patents registered every year. The latter aspect is a clear indicator of the high innovation component in our industry. When it comes to the blow moulding part of the portfolio, the patents are especially addressing opportunities for equipment optimisation.

 

Why do certain developments, such as the coating of PET bottles, still struggle with acceptance by customers?

Le Guen: The beverage industry has been traditionally facing very low acceptance rates around recycled bottles, with or without coating, but we can see the consumer perception is changing fast. As a case in point, in a recent success story, Sidel supported StrongPack Ltd., a Nigerian co-packer, in its mission to become the number one, high-quality, non-alcoholic contract packaging company in Africa. As part of this greenfield project, StrongPack installed a total of four complete lines, including a PET line integrating Sidel’s ActisTM coating system. This unique plasma coating solution can extend the shelf life of beverages bottled in PET, while enabling package lightweighting with no compromises on recyclability. It is used mainly in packaging CSDs, beer and oxygen sensitive beverages such as juices, tea or coffee. Helped by the Actis technology and the increased shelf life of the PET bottles, StrongPack is now able to reach additional markets in West Africa that otherwise would not be available to them. In addition – while refreshing their bottles’ designs – the Nigerian co-packer was able to achieve a 25% reduction of the containers’ weight, allowing them to roughly save about three tons of PET resin per day.