PACCOR has invested a significant amount of resource and effort over the last year in Mansfield, UK on the project to design, test and roll out the new continuous compression moulded (CCM) caps. The successful completion of several years of development has allowed the company to launch in February 2019 stealth caps, which weigh approximately 13% less than the previous design, i.e. 1.3g instead of 1.5g. Since the inception of this dairy closure, where the 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.
“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.“ – commented Juergen Lehmann, Sales Director International, PACCOR. “Taking into account that PACCOR has a market share of approximately 85% of the UK fresh-milk closure market, this innovative change will allow savings of millions of Euros.“ – added Lehmann from PACCOR.
As a result of the strategy, PACCOR offers highly innovative products in the ways of materials, design and function and the new, lighter sustainable caps are just a good example of it. One of the European leading producers of branded and private label fresh milk, cream, butter and ingredients, was the first of PACCOR’s client which used the new stealth caps. All of PACCOR’s customers are now converting to the innovative bottle closures. They have also commented that the change has been seamless in their processes with no need for any changes to equipment or machine settings – a result of a stringent design process which considered all critical dimensions required to allow the cap to travel efficiently through customers filling lines.
Due to the success of the light-weighting programme on caps, the company has now begun to apply similar design principles and technology to conceptual injection moulded cream-pots on the IML product range. Thanks to that, PACCOR (Mansfield) UK will reduce plastic usage on a much bigger scale without compromising the performance of its products both in the supply-chain and is giving an enhanced consumer experience when in use.
“Currently 70% of the tooling capacity has been converted to run Stealth with the project continuing until all have been converted. There will be further detailed scientific work commissioned once this total market conversion has been completed, however PACCOR’s Design Team have already begun conceptual work on the next generation of this market leading closure. This kind of innovative approach is essential to protecting our dominant market position by offering added-value features and lower costs to our customers” – said Ashley Jones, PACCOR UK Managing Director.
