CAPS AND CLOSURES | INNOVATION
Caps and closures producers and their suppliers have been innovating to keep up with sustainability trends, including mandatory tethering and the growing use of recycled material. By David Eldridge
Tethered and recycled: Caps market drivers
Sustainability tops the agenda in the caps sector, just as it does in the wider plastics packaging industry. There is a well-established trend for lightweighting caps and closures, with the benefit of reducing plastics usage and helping brand owners towards their sustainability goals. In the EU, caps producers also need to meet demand for tethered caps as their customers strive to meet the Single Use Plastics (SUP) Directive’s 2024 deadline for caps to stay attached to the bottle after opening to prevent them from polluting terrestrial and marine environments. Recycling is another major priority for water and soft drinks brands. Drinks industry association UNESDA Soft Drinks
Europe has made a pledge that all beverage packaging in the EU will be fully circular by 2030. Its commitment relates to primary packaging, corre- sponding to beverage containers (such as PET bottles), caps and labels. The industry’s intent was clear in UNESDA’s announcement of the circularity commitment last year: “Our goal is that beverage packaging achieves full circularity and is recognised as a resource in a circular economy: it has value, is recyclable, is collected and used as recycled content,” said Ian Ellington, UNESDA President and SVP and Chief Category Officer, PepsiCo Europe.
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Companies in the caps value chain have been busy developing tethering solutions since the SUP Directive was introduced by the European Com- mission in June 2019. “There are a variety of tethering solutions on the market,” says Michael White, Director of Business Development Closures at Husky Technologies, which supplies cap moulding machines and has developed tethered cap designs in response to the SUP Directive. “We believe that the Husky solution is the best way forward as it offers an intuitive operational ap- proach. The shell is locked in place 180° out of the way to provide easy drinking/pouring.” Husky has designed its PCO1881 portfolio
tethered closure for CSD bottles to open to 180° while remaining attached to the bottle. The group’s 30/25 portfolio tethered closure is for still water applications with shell locking capability at 160°. These caps have a moulded bridge with a hinge design that provides tactile and audible feedback so the consumer knows when the closure is in the locked position. The caps fully unscrew from the neck of the bottle and behave like any flip-top closure but with the added benefit of locking capability. A more basic alternative uses a slit approach in which the thether is created by simple
April 2022 | INJECTION WORLD 19
Main image: French dairy brand Elle & Vire is using the Tetra Pak HeliCap 23 cap for its cream products
IMAGE: TETRA PAK
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