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Home > Environment > Winning by losing

Winning by losing

PBG makes big environmental gains by shedding bottle weight.

Walter Samylenko looks at a handful of plastic and sees millions of gallons of oil that can be saved.

Samylenko is the Director of Packaging Engineering at PBG and since 2005 has been deeply involved in developing new ways for the company to reduce the amount of plastic in its bottles through initiatives called lightweighting.

Though bottles made from plastic are 100 percent recyclable and account for a relatively tiny amount of society’s oil consumption, PBG has spent millions of dollars to reduce the amount of plastic it uses. “With our huge production volume, every gram of plastic taken out of a bottle translates to hefty savings,” says Samylenko.

For example, in 2005 a half-liter Aquafina bottle weighed in at 24 grams. Today, a growing number of PBG plants can manufacture and fill bottles weighing as little as 14.8 grams (see The do-it-yourself approach sidebar on the right.). Twenty-ounce Aquafina bottles weigh 20.6 grams, down from 24 grams in 2005. The weight of 1.5-liter bottles used for Aquafina and other beverages has dropped from 54 to 47 grams, and the caps are 1.6 grams lighter. PBG is also beginning to use bottles with 20 percent less plastic for non-carbonated brands such as Lipton Iced Tea, Tropicana juice drinks, Aquafina Alive and Aquafina FlavorSplash.

Over the past three years, PBG has saved 74 million pounds of plastic on Aquafina bottles alone. At the same time, it has reduced the use of the petrochemicals, water and energy that go into manufacturing plastic.

How low can you go?

To make these gains, Samylenko, along with his engineering counterparts at PepsiCo, worked with equipment and bottle manufacturers to develop bottle designs that use less plastic and still perform well. “The role of packaging is greater than that of distribution container. Quality packaging protects a product from breakage and tampering, and reduces spoilage to extend a product’s shelf-life,” notes Samylenko. “So in addition to strength requirements for loading, warehousing and distributing, bottles serve a variety of purposes that cannot be compromised.”

Still, the engineers found ways to make the sidewalls of bottles thinner by reinforcing them with ribbing. They reshaped bottle profiles and redesigned the necks to accommodate smaller, lighter caps. They even reduced the label size on half-liter Aquafina bottles by 50 percent.

So far, most of the lightweighting has focused on bottles for Aquafina and other non-carbonated brands. Bottles for carbonated brands are poor candidates for lightweighting, due to the need for sidewalls heavy enough to safely withstand high internal pressures and retain carbonation. Even with non-carbonated products such as juices and teas, bottle walls must be thick enough to keep oxygen from elbowing between the plastic molecules and reaching the contents, where it can affect flavor and reduce shelf life.

Despite these challenges, Samylenko and others persevere, looking for that next gram of plastic they can eliminate and the millions of additional pounds of plastic they can save.

The do-it-yourself approach

PBG shrinks its environmental footprint by making its own bottles.

One of the biggest challenges in taking more weight out of plastic bottles is keeping empties strong enough to survive the trip from the bottle manufacturer to the bottling plant.

So what if there were no trip? What if PBG fed its bottling lines with bottles made just a few feet away?

Since 2004, PBG has been doing just that, generating key environmental efficiencies in the process. In 2007, the company announced its biggest self-manufacturing initiative yet, a plan to equip its largest plant, in Toronto, with four bottle blowing production lines by the end of 2008.

A triple-play ROI

As with all major capital expenditure decisions, PBG studied both the economic and the environmental impacts of the proposed investment. The analysis showed the potential not only for major economic benefits but also for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of the bottle manufacturing and transportation processes for the Toronto operation by 35 percent.

For example, trucks will deliver compact plastic preforms for the manufacturing equipment instead of full-size, empty bottles. That will reduce the number of deliveries by 90 percent, saving diesel fuel and cutting emissions.

Energy usage will drop as well. PBG’s state-of- the-art bottle forming equipment is more efficient than the older equipment that many third-party bottle manufacturers still use.

What’s more, the PBG Toronto plant’s need to rinse trucked-in bottles before filling them will be eliminated because the bottle blowing and filling process will now be side-by-side, saving hundreds of thousands of gallons of water each year.

“We are confident that expanding self-manufacturing and lightweighting across PBG will generate higher productivity and greater efficiencies,” says John Thibodeau, Vice President of Worldwide Engineering. “We’ll also reduce our use of natural resources, and cut waste as well. It’s hard to argue with that kind of triple-play return on investment.”