Liquid packaging has been draining beverage companies millions of shillings. However, a new initiative from Sidel, a global provider of PET solutions for liquid packaging, is set to save these billions if the companies will incorporate it into their systems. PET savings calculator allows beverage producers and bottlers to determine the cost of their own production and savings based on their own production parameters.

“The benefits of lightweighting PET bottles are well known in the beverage industry. However many producers are still not taking advantage of innovative new bottle designs that could help them make substantial cost savings,” says Clive Smith, Zone Vice-President for the Middle East and Africa at Sidel, adding that there remains a ‘great opportunity for the beverage industry to reduce raw material usage, save costs and improve environmental footprints by adopting new bottle designs, especially for water and carbonated soft drinks (CSD).’

Sidel has been launching innovative bottle designs in the last 18 months. The RightWeight bottle concept and Sidel StarLite have been widely used in the soft drinks market. The latest design is the PET calculator which enables water and CSD producers to easily calculate how much they could save by utilising a Sidel StarLite base and a shorter neck. The calculator allows producers to enter their current production conditions for water or CSD products, such as current bottle neck format, raw material costs, annual production hours and blower speed. It then immediately calculates how much money could be saved per line by simply adapting the bottle design to use the Sidel StarLite base and shorter neck. According to Sidel data, globally, the average line can save between USD 300,000 and USD 1 million, with faster lines or larger bottle formats capable of saving even more.

This leads to an approximate average saving per bottle of up to 0.005 dollars per 0.5 litre bottle or 0.007 dollars per 2 litre bottle for still water, and 0.005 dollars per 0.5 litre bottle or 0.006 dollars per 2 litre bottle for CSD. Euromonitor predictions for 2014-2018, released in March 2014 say that 216 billion PET bottles for still water and 116 billion PET bottles for CSD will have been produced by the end of the year. Assuming a minimum saving of 0.005 dollars for all those bottles, the beverage industry as a whole could save 1.08 billion dollars for water and 580 dollars for CSD.

In total this equates to over USD 1.66 billion potential cost savings for the beverage industry from water and CSD alone on a global scale. This does not include other categories such as juices, liquid dairy products and other products.

Commenting on this, Samuel Gobbe, Service Director, Sidel GMEA, stated – “We did the calculation exercise to show the potential that RightWeighting provides globally. However, we also recognised the value of producers being able to find out the specific savings that they can achieve and have therefore introduced the packaging calculator to enable them to do so.”