Mount Franklin wins packaging award

Coca-Cola Amatil's new Mount Franklin easy-crush bottle - said to be the lightest Australian produced 600ml water bottle - has won Gold in the Sustainability category of the 2011 Australian Packaging Design Awards.

The Australian Packaging Covenant’s Sustainability Award is for an existing brand for which the packaging demonstrates a significant advance in environmental considerations, or a new brand which reduces the environmental impact of packaging and will provide a benchmark for its product/market segment. The Australian Packaging Design Awards are conducted by the Packaging Council of Australia (PCA).

The easy-crush bottle is 13.1 g and uses 35% less plastic than the previous Mount Franklin bottle.

The judging comments stated, “The Mount Franklin Easy-Crush Bottle successfully promotes responsible behaviour by consumers. The simple twist and crush process reduces the size and amount of space needed to transport it to recycling centres. The increased crushability, material use reduction and increase in vertical load and stacking stability has this entry ticking the sustainability boxes along its entire life cycle.”

The bottle is made by CCA using new bottle self-manufacture technology, or 'blow-fill' on facility production lines.

CCA’s $450 million investment in blow-fill is the largest infrastructure investment for the company in a decade and the technology is being installed across CCA’s production facilities in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Fiji from 2010-2015.

The blow-fill technology is enabling CCA to redesign and lightweight its entire small carbonated soft drink and water PET bottle range, delivering significant cost savings, production efficiency gains, increased product shelf life and stacking ability.

Crucially, blow-fill is delivering against key environmental sustainability goals in both energy and water savings: enabling bottles to be produced using less PET resin and with more recycled (or post-consumer) resin; reducing the use of cardboard and shrink plastic in secondary packaging; making labels lighter using less raw materials; and eliminating the need for a plastic liner in the closures, or caps, which are also shorter in size, and again, manufactured using less PET resin.

A 2011 Master Thesis study of the new bottle self-manufacture technology at the Northmead, Sydney facility found that the technology has delivered a 22% reduction in the carbon footprint of every beverage container on average.* This is equivalent to 1700 cars being removed from the roads per year.

CCA estimates that more than 9,000 tonnes of PET resin will be saved per year when all production lines across the group have installed blow-fill technology.

Water savings are significant too. The installed blow-fill lines at Northmead, Sydney will deliver an estimated 8% improvement in water efficiency at the facility by the end of 2011.

*source: Martina Birk – MSc Thesis “Case study- Coca-Cola Amatil, Australia: Comparison of carbon footprint converter model v blow-fill technology for PET bottles” August 2011.