New ‘Eco-Audit’ for Your PET Bottle Lines | Plastics Technology

Sidel introduces a three-phase audit of environmental impact of PET stretch-blow molding operations.

Sidel’s Eco-Audit can help save materials, energy and production cost and reduce environmental impact of the operation. Source: Sidel

PET bottle makers and their brand-owner customers are becoming more sensitive to environmental impacts of plastic packaging. Reducing such impacts starts with measuring their current state. A new service from Sidel accomplishes both tasks — impact assessment and reduction — by auditing the energy and materials consumption, and resulting carbon footprint, of PET stretch-blowing lines. According to Sidel, implementing the results of this “Eco-Audit” can translate into significant savings in operating costs, as well as enhanced brand image.

According to Mathieu Druon, Sidel’s Eco-Audit product manager, determining how to reduce the environmental impact of any individual PET bottle system involves a complex mix of factors, such as the quality of the material and design of the preform; heating and blowing technologies; and the technical configuration and operation of the machine — from production to maintenance.

The new Eco-Audit service involves three phases:

All three phases can take advantage of Sidel’s Evo-ON Eco software, which monitors a PET bottle line’s water, chemicals and energy consumption in real time.

Druon says two test Eco-Audits with clients yielded in one case an annual reduction in carbon footprint of 7 metric tons of CO2 equivalent and over 80,000 Euros in saved production costs. The other test case reduced the carbon footprint by 157 MT of CO2 equivalent and saved over 180,000 Euros. In both cases, ROI was barely a few months, according to Druon.

In the near future, Sidel intends to broaden the scope of Eco-Audit beyond PET bottle blowing to other equipment, starting with bottle washers and pasteurizers.

Of all the trends you can see at NPE2024, this one is BIG. Not only is the auto industry transitioning to electrification but there are concerted efforts to modify the materials used, especially polymers, for interior applications.

In both flexible and rigid packaging, the trend is to replace multimaterial laminates, coextrusions and “composites” with single-material structures, usually based on PE or PP. Nonpackaging applications are following suit.

Learn here how to take advantage of new lightweighting and recycle utilization opportunities in consumer packaging, thanks to a collaboration of leaders in microcellular foaming and multilayer head design.