Industry's First Tethered PET Beverage Caps

Origin Materials, a technology company with a mission to enable the world’s transition to sustainable materials, revealed engineering and design innovations in its manufacturing of tethered PET caps, the first tethered PET caps ever made.

“The EU Single-Use Plastic Directive, which came into effect last month, mandates that caps stay connected to bottles throughout the European Union,” said John Bissell, Origin Co-Founder and Co-CEO. “Our PET cap innovations are perfectly suited for that regulatory environment—and frankly any environment. We expect many other regions to introduce their own tethered beverage cap requirements as well, following the example of the EU. With our leading PET cap technology and manufacturing systems, we are extremely well positioned to address a $65 billion caps and closures market that consumes billions upon billions of caps per year which today cannot be recycled into new caps, only downcycled.”

Bissell added: “If you’re going to keep caps connected to bottles, the logical thing to do is make the cap and the bottle from the same material: PET. Otherwise recycling centers face the problem of separating tethered HDPE or polypropylene caps from PET bottles. With our solution, caps and bottles can be recycled together easily with no need to separate. That’s a real breakthrough for recycling circularity because it increases purity and keeps valuable, high-performing PET plastic in the loop.”

The tethered PET cap complements Origin’s previously announced PET closure, which is the world’s lightest CSD (carbonated soft drink) cap compatible with the PCO 1881 neck finish and the first PET cap produced with commercial-scale equipment. Origin’s PET caps can be made with any type of PET plastic, whether virgin PET, recycled PET (rPET), or bio-based PET.

“Our patent-pending tethered cap design is simple, clever, and user-friendly,” said Bissell. “We use the threads of the PET cap and bottle to lock the cap into place, angled away from the mouth, not toward it. We are combining the performance and sustainability advantages of our PET caps – recyclability, shelf-life extension, lightweighting, ability to use recycled PET, and enablement of mono-material packaging – with an excellent user experience. We have already seen extremely strong interest in this welcome addition to our PET cap product line.”

Origin’s PCO 1881-compatible caps will be commercially available beginning in Q4 2024, with PCO 1881-compatible tethered caps to follow afterward. In conjunction with world-class partners, we are solving the most difficult sustainability challenges, in alignment with our core mission to help transition the world to sustainable materials.