APPE wins at the Nestlé UK & I Supplier Awards

PET packaging specialist, APPE, has won an award at this year’s Nestlé UK & Ireland Supplier Awards; the award was for the ‘Fuelling the Virtuous Circle’ category.

APPE’s award entry was based on a light-weighting project involving two of Nestlé Water’s brands - Buxton and Pure Life. Working closely with the Nestlé Waters division, APPE was able to significantly reduce the weight of the 250/330ml and 500ml Buxton and Pure Life preforms. Through the light-weighting project, which was implemented in 2012, the weight of the 500ml preform was reduced by 27% and the 250ml/330ml preform was light-weighted by a huge 42%. To July 2014, these light-weighting projects combined achieved a total saving of 5726 tonnes of PET resin. The savings achieved are in turn being reinvested by Nestlé Waters to fund additional capacity to fuel the rapidly growing water market. In addition to financial benefits from the project, the environmental impact of the light-weighting was significant. 5726 tonnes of PET resin equates to 3350 tonnes of carbon equivalent or 12,293 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.  To put this in context, this is the same as 30 million miles being driven by an average sized car and would take 315,000 tree saplings growing for 10 years to offset. Also smaller preforms mean that 52% more can be accommodated in secondary packaging used to deliver them; this in turn reduced the number of trucks required to transport the preforms from the APPE factory in North Wales to Nestlé Waters’ filling plant in Buxton, Derbyshire. Commenting on APPE’s success, Andrew Davenport, Head of Supply Chain at Nestlé Waters said that APPE had beat off some pretty strong competition to win the award and that . . .“certainly we could not have made the progress on light-weighting that we have without the full commitment of APPE.”  He went on to say: “..To my knowledge (Nestlé) has one of the lightest bottles and that is really some achievement. So a huge thank you and congratulations to the APPE team. Well done.” Martin Hargreaves, APPE’s CEO said: “Congratulations to the teams involved in this project. APPE is the recognised industry expert at light-weighting preforms and bottles, so winning an award for our skills in this area is fantastic, especially from our customers.”