All good sportspeople and fitness fans know it’s not what you do once that counts, it’s what you usually do. Results aren’t one offs, but rather the result of continual good actions. The same goes for sports nutrition and vitamins; you can’t take supplements for one day and expect to see results straight away.
That same principle of continual good actions is what has prompted the Pont team to put its PetPacker range on a sustainable fitness regime. Pont Packaging produces sustainable glass and plastic packaging for a wide range of food and beverage applications, including its PetPacker range which is focused on the specific needs of the sports nutrition and vitamin sector.
Jacquelien Spenkelink, purchase director at Pont, led the project, which was driven by the company’s ongoing dedication to providing sustainable packaging solutions for its customers. Spenkelink explains, “Ultimately, we’re here to provide our customers with whatever glass, plastic or bio-based packaging they want, but we hope that they will make sustainable choices. To encourage that, the Pont team is going through our whole portfolio to see how we can make our offer as responsible as possible; that way, our customers can know that choosing Pont means choosing sustainability as standard.”
The Pont PetPacker range is evolving as its sustainable fitness regime means it is lighter and more responsible. Spenkelink continues, “Our customers expect reliability and performance from our products, and we’re making sure that sustainability is added to that expectation too. We’ve talked for a while about lightweighting our PetPacker range as we know we have the expertise, so when we started hearing from customers that they would appreciate a more sustainable container for their sports nutrition and vitamin products, we knew we had to make it happen!”
Lightweighted PetPacker packaging is fit for the future
Same performance, better sustainability
The expertise Pont has drawn on to ensure its range of lightweighted PetPacker containers meet the requirements of customers in this demanding sector include the technical skills of Spenkelink and her team. She says, “It’s crucial that we can explain to our sales team how the technical elements have been considered so that customers can be assured their containers will perform correctly time and time again. Remember that sports nutrition products and vitamins are opened at least daily, often many times a day, with the products inside lasting for months, needing to be kept dry. So, we’re carefully checking the top load, which depends on the capping machine, we’re looking at the material distribution, the labelling process. It’s all a balance so that everything runs smoothly on the filling line.”
It is this balance that is at the heart of the sustainability fitness regime at Pont. Understanding that sustainability is a long-term approach to an issue that affects us all means that Pont is happy to offer advice to all customers about how best to integrate smarter choices into their packaging. Pont’s Sustainability Manager Angela Thijssen works with all the Pont teams to provide a single point of contact for sustainability issues, with the PetPacker lightweighting project benefiting from her expertise. Thijssen says, “We’re a close-knit team and we always work together to share our expertise as this is the best way to bring efficiency to a project, which is passed on to our customers. There are various practical reasons for the lightweighted PetPacker range to be introduced now; market demands, European plastic taxes, the upcoming PPWR [Packaging & Packaging Waste Regulation], and the desire to meet changing PET regulations. We already have a strategy to reduce virgin PET use and have 30 – 100% rPET products in our range.”
Thijssen adds that part of Pont’s aim is to make being more sustainable as easy as possible for its customers, so that the only decision they need to make is choosing Pont, and the rest is simple. She adds, “It’s an exciting time to choose sustainable packaging from Pont; the rPET raw material available is sufficient and stable, we’re here to help with design development and testing, the PetPacker weight is great for its function and we have plenty of samples available. There’s no point in waiting until the strictest regulations kick in and then panicking to create packaging that meets customers’ branding and performance requirements. We have time now to make it exactly as they want – the colour, the closure...all in a lightweighted container that’s easy to open time and time again.”
The Pont PetPacker range has achieved a 16 – 18% weight reduction and all are totally recyclable in the right colour, helping to support the circular economy from both sides. With 27 different references of containers ranging from 60ml up to 950ml and 38mm, 45mm and 53mm neck finishes with screw neck or hinge guard closures.
Project lead Jacquelien Spenkelink concludes by sharing how the Pont team can help customers to make the transition to sustainable packaging as smooth as possible, saying, “It’s up to us to make this transition comfortable for customers; we have plenty of resources available for free to help, including our dedicated My Green Packaging website, our sample kits, and of course our experts. We can reassure customers that our lightweighted PetPacker products have the same performance and the same quality – they're just better for the environment and meet the upcoming regulations. Any hesitancy can be explained and understood by talking to us, it’s far better to do that now and keep control of your packaging than to wait until it’s legislation.”