For years, San Francisco-based Chevron U.S.A. Products Company sold its fuel additives in bottles made of 100% virgin Barex®, a rubber-modified copolymer of acrylonitrile and methylacrylate. But in the last 18 months, the company has switched to a roughly 50:50 blend of the virgin and recycled resin. BP Chemicals (Cleveland, OH) provides the virgin Barex resin and the Barex RC recycled-content resin used for the blend. The change to recycled-content resin involves bottles for nine products, marketed primarily under the PRO-GARD® and TECHRON® brand names. Chevron says that it's made the change without affecting performance, and at little or no added cost. How? "Recycled-content materials are generally more costly than virgin because of collection, cleaning and freight costs. But we've located a large reliable supply [of the recycled material]." So says Gene H. Duckett, new products development manager for the Consumer Products Team, part of Chevron's Global Lubricants Unit. "We pay the same for this blend of resin as we did for the virgin material, which makes it very attractive for us." BP collects, cleans and reprocesses post-industrial waste from several sources. The primary supplier prefers not to be identified. BP acquires the tinted scrap from several of that supplier's plants. BP sends the blended resin to Silgan Plastics (Chesterfield, MO) and Owens-Brockway (Toledo, OH) for extrusion/blow-molding of the fuel additive bottles. Bottles are shipped to Chevron's Fort Madison, Iowa plant for filling. Decorating methods vary, depending on the specific brand. They include using a heat-transfer process or either paper or pressure-sensitive labels. The new bottles had no effect on filling line performance, Duckett says. The products are sold to major mass merchandisers, and through Chevron's network of jobbers. "Shelf life for products in bottles using the recycled-content Barex is five years," says Duckett. "We conducted accelerated storage tests and saw no adverse effect on shelf life by going to the recycled-content bottle."
Bottles fuel use of recycled resin
Chevron incorporates recycled-content resin in its bottles for fuel additives, taking a proactive approach to potential legislative container requirements.
Jun 30, 1996
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