Esterform has recently installed in-house PET blending facilities at its specialist preform manufacturing site in Leeds. This new in-house facility offers greater flexibility with regard to the percentages of RPET used in manufacture. In order to provide the capacity to store greater quantities of raw material and to house the new blends we have also invested in new silo capacity.
The use of post consumer, recycled PET is of increasing interest to beverage and food brands, as their consumers look to them to use resources sensibly. Esterform where required uses recovered material from fully approved re-cycling organisations offering fully certified food grade plastics.
We are already helping our customers offer significant levels of recycled material in their bottles. However with our new facility we able to lead projects to trial and increase the percentages of RPET used. The introduction of greater levels of RPET has consequences on how the blends perform both in the injection and blow moulding process. Our quality assurance team work with our laboratory to set product specifications to ensure ease of processing. The recently introduced automated inspection system monitors the quality and colour variability that comes with recovered material so that pack performance is not compromised.
As always, Esterform’s customer support engineers are on hand to help with the introduction of the new materials to our customer’s process.