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Send to KindleBottle made of OCC and ONP
“We’re setting up a manufacturing infrastructure in North America that we hope to have near completion by October,” says Ecologic CEO Julie Corbett. “We think molded fiber is an emerging packaging option. The source material is abundant, the molding technology is improving, and consumers really like it. It’s like blow molding with paper instead of plastic resin.”
Formerly an investment manager who launched Ecologic three years ago, Corbett is reluctant to quantify cycle times achieved on the 12-cavity TPM molding machine. “We’ve done some fairly significant work with TPM, and I think we’re reaching speeds that are among the best in the industry,” she says. “To some extent, our bottle-making expertise is our secret weapon.”
Familiar look and feel
Corbett and Swaine say that the container was made to resemble the laundry detergent container consumers are accustomed to. So the neck finish is a very familiar 51 mm and the threaded drain-back cap also gives consumers a familiar look and feel. If you make the package too incredibly different, says Corbett, you wind up scaring consumers away.
Also perfectly conventional is the manner in which the bottle is filled, labeled, and capped, all of which is done by contract packager Genlabs". Anything but conventional are the bottle assembly steps that precede filling. It's a work in progress, says Swaine." One day, he hopes, it will be more automated. For now, he says, the important thing is that the bottle is making it onto store shelves so that consumer acceptance can be gauged.
The package consists of six parts: bottle, inner liner, neck finish fitment, threaded closure, and front and back labels. The injection-molded LDPE neck finish fitment is welded to the bag by the bag-maker, whom Swaine chooses not to identify. At Genlabs, the first step in filling is placement of the inner liner into the molded fiber shell. Then an adhesive is applied along the perimeter of the shell and the two halves are folded together so that what was a shell is now a bottle. At that point, Genlabs sends the bottles through its conventional plastic bottle filling, capping, labeling line. Pressure-sensitive labels are supplied by AC Label.
Six bottles are placed in a corrugated shipper that, says Swaine, is a little more robust than needed. The firm didn’t want top-load issues to cloud market-place reaction to the novel container. Some lightweighting of the case will likely occur soon.
In the meantime, Swaine and colleagues at Seventh Generation are pretty excited about the paper bottle’s future. “This is the bottle that holds everything we believe in,” notes a March 9 entry in 7GenBlog. “And you won’t believe it when you finally hold it yourself.”
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