Eckes-Granini is making its packaging portfolio even more environmentally friendly with the help of KHS Group. Since the middle of May its one-litre Hohes C juice bottle has consisted entirely of rPET.
Eckes-Granini has been using 25% rPET in its Hohes C PET bottles since 2018, and KHS’s Bottles & Shapes experts in Hamburg were responsible for optimisation of the bottle. The new containers will continue to be produced on the InnoPET FreshSafe block. “Bearing the EU’s plastic strategy in mind and the increase in recyclate quotas this prescribes, we decided to switch to rPET only,” said Hermann Naumann, plant manager for Eckes-Granini in Bad Fallingbostel in Lower Saxony. We want to be a pioneer as regards the circular economy and set a good example for the beverage industry.”
With its holistic Bottles & Shapes consultancy programme, KHS customers benefit from more than 40 years of expertise in container design and production. Here, beverage producers state their preferences regarding the weight, shape, or stability of the container – for instance, upon which the system’s supplier assesses the feasibility of the design with the help of laboratory tests and simulation. In the case of Eckes-Granini, the specifications were clear: switch to 100% rPET while maintaining the homogeneous quality of the container. According to Eckes-Granini, the change to rPET will save more than 4,000 metric tonnes of new PET per annum. This in turn means the bottler will cut its carbon emissions by about 8,000 tonnes a year. Finding ways of saving on resources was not the only focus of the ambitious project. The ability to do so on the KHS InnoPET FreshSafe block in operation at Eckes-Granini since 2017 also had to be investigated.
“One of the concerns was whether either the preforms or machine needed adapting,” said Matthias Kruse, head of PET Technology at KHS. “We thus assessed the quality of the recycled PET material. This is crucial, for large variances in colour, molecular length and inhomogeneity quickly reduce the efficiency of production.”