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Carrying a torch for sustainable packaging

A switch to PET jug preforms for lamp fuels improves sustainability and reduces in-transit package damage.

Pw 5110 Lamplight Roberts Poly Pro Aa

Lamplight Farms, Inc., Menomonee Falls, WI, is a market leader in outdoor torches, citronella fuel, indoor oil lamps, and lamp oil. One of the company’s signature products is Tiki® Citronella Torch Fuel, which, until recently, was packaged in premade, 1-gal polyvinyl chloride jugs. But the PVC bottles were experiencing unacceptable levels of container breakage during transit. The 1-gal jugs also created handling challenges in terms of unloading and storing the containers, and then transporting and loading them onto the filling line. 

In November 2007, Lamplight transitioned from buying the bulky premade PVC jugs to using PET preforms (from a proprietary supplier) to manufacture the bottles in-house on a bottle former from KHS Corpoplast North America (www.khscorpoplast.com). Lamplight considered the move to PET bottles an important sustainability improvement. PET is more universally recycled than PVC, offering a greater likelihood of being recovered and reused. In addition, the company achieved a 28% reduction in the amount of bottle packaging material used—going from 145 g to 105 g per jug.

After forming, the PET bottles are not touched by packaging personnel again until the case-packing stage. The bottles are routed to a 30-head filler from MRM/Elgin, a subsidiary of Cozzoli Machine Co. (www.cozzoli.com), then to a six-head capper from Fowler Products Co. (www.fowlerproducts.com), a division of Pro Mach.

The bottles also go through a Series 6000 labeling machine from Label-Aire (www.label-aire.com). The pressure-sensitive, four- and five-color process-printed labels are supplied by Flexo Graphics, Inc. (www.flexo-graphics.com).

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