A pair of companies — one in the United States and one in Switzerland — say they expect to be the first to make PET caps and closures at a commercial scale.
Packaging machine producer PackSys Global AG (W6361) of Ruti, Switzerland, and Origin Materials Inc. of West Sacramento, Calif., which describes itself as a carbon negative materials company, said pairing PET caps and closures with PET bottles will make recyclers' lives easier.
"PET closures can be a game changer for closure recycling. Most beverage closures are today made from HDPE and while closure recycling rates are increasing, especially in Europe where closure tethering will be mandatory starting July 2024, a beverage container remains a two-material solution," said Ueli Kobel, director of PackSys Global's Slitting Division, in a statement.
High density polyethylene and polypropylene have been the go-to softer resins for bottle caps because of their ability to provide a better seal on harder PET bottles. But the difference in resins between caps and bottles requires additional steps during the recycling process to separate and capture the plastics. Marrying a PET cap with a PET bottle would simplify bottle recyclers' lives.
"Our system will allow us to bring the recycling, sustainability, and performance benefits of our PET cap and closure solution to the world. We expect it will be the first of many such production lines for making not just beverage packaging better and fully recyclable, but containers of nearly every kind," said Origin Co-CEO John Bissell in a statement.
In August 2023, his company revealed it was working on an all-PET solution for caps and bottles.
"This is what happens when you bring together some of the best materials and polymer scientists and engineers in the world under one roof," Bissell said at the time. "We saw an obvious need for a mono-material solution and the creativity of our team rose to the challenge."
Origin sees development of the PET caps and closures as a pathway to profitability for the company, which recently started running a facility in Sarnia, Ontario, to convert wood residues into intermediate chemicals. A path to profitability, the company said, is now "entirely independent of the scale-up of our biomass conversion technology."
A recent quarterly earnings news release for the publicly traded company provided some more insight into the PET cap development effort for Origin.
"Our patent-pending PET caps and closures are a breakthrough for the industry," Bissell said at that point. "For a wide variety of containers our technology enables the lightest cap, reducing plastic waste and improving sustainability. They perform better than today's HDPE and PP caps in ways that can improve product shelf life and are designed for circularity."
Third-party testing on the PET caps, which have been produced at a rate of "thousands of caps per hour," validates cap performance meets or exceeds industry standards, Origin said. There also has been some preliminary consumer testing.