02.17.09
Lightening the Load
Taking the excess bulk out of a package is one way to lessen the bottom line—and at the same time, increase efforts to go green.
By Joanna Cosgrove, Online Editor
The trickle-down effect of our dismal current economy has penetrated every facet of the consumer goods industry, including the packaging segment. But at a time when rising material costs are met by shrinking budgets, a little design ingenuity can make the process of trimming the fat less of a bloodletting. The concept of “lightweighting” has become a phenomenon across every packaging sector, not the least of which is the cosmetic and personal care industry. Lightweighting a package means to reduce its amount of superfluous packaging materials, the result of which can impact the bottom line, not only from a cost of materials standpoint, but also when it comes to shipping fees as well. A bonus side effect of lightweighting beyond the obvious cost savings is the “green factor” associated with using less wasteful packaging or, even better, sustainable packaging materials—something that appeals to a growing number of consumers.
Alcan Packaging Beauty’s Slender tubes are marketed as having “the lightest flip-top oriented cap for tubes.” |
For plastic molders, an equally strong consideration for lightweighting is cost. “In the world of plastic molding, thick walls equate to additional cycle times and higher material contents. Both factors contribute highly to cost,” says Warford. “The constant balancing act that plastic molders of packaging products face, both now and in the past, is how to provide plastic packaging options that exhibit the desired look, perceived luxury, and technical efficacy and performance at costs that the cosmetic and personal care product marketers can work with. Add to that the importance of being environmental stewards and providing green products wherever possible. The two concepts work hand in hand, and the relationship between cost and being green is real and has never been as dominant as it is today.”
Alpha Packaging of Saint Louis, MO, has helped many beauty and personal care companies effectively reduce the bulk of their plastic use while at the same time adding to the package’s green quotient. “While companies don’t always think of lightweighting their packaging to make it more sustainable, it can be one of the options we steer them toward if they are evaluating a bottle or jar that can likely be made with less gram weight,” says Marny Bielefeldt, marketing manager. “For example, Alpha has recently lightweighted about a dozen of our stock jars with 70mm and 89mm necks, removing nearly ten percent of the gram weight from each jar, and we’ve made the lightweight jars our new standard. As another example, when designing custom bottles for customers, we sometimes have more than one preform that would work for the custom bottle, and we can help the customer determine if the preform with less gram weight will make a bottle that meets their needs.”
Bielefeldt notes that it’s important to remember that if a bottle weighs 10% less than the bottle it replaces, it won’t necessarily cost 10% less, since resin costs are only part of the equation in the total cost of any bottle. “But, since high-quality recycled resins and bioresins typically run at least ten percent more than the cost of virgin petroleum-based resins, lightweighting is a good way to control the cost of ‘greening’ your packaging – especially when resin prices are fluctuating so dramatically in this economy,” she says.
Efficient Beauty
As Warford alluded to earlier, one outstanding caveat of the lightweighting process, especially in the beauty segment, is the ability to craft a lighter weight package that doesn’t sacrifice a brand’s design aesthetic or the package’s perception of luxury.
Using its process for developing a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle as an example, Bielefeldt says Alpha approaches a lightweighting project just like it approaches any new package design. “First, we consider the characteristics of the preform we plan to use. This tells us approximately how tall and wide the bottle or jar can be in order to maintain acceptable wall thicknesses in all areas of the container,” she explains. “After creating drawings and getting those approved by the customer, we would build a unit cavity mold and blow prototype bottles for testing. If those prototypes pass our quality inspections—and meet the aesthetic and performance requirements of the customer—we would then move on to building the production tooling (blow sets) for the bottle or jar. For any ‘lightweight’ package, we would select the preform with the least amount of gram weight possible to still make a good bottle.”
But there are tradeoffs. “For companies that want the tactile and visual impression of glass from their plastic packaging, the lightweight bottles and jars are not going to have the same thick walls as a heavyweight plastic container, so they may need to make an aesthetic compromise to pursue the lightweight option,” she comments. “Not all bottles can be successfully lightweighted, however, and there can be significant tooling costs involved with creating a new bottle from a new perform. The costs for the entire development process, including the unit cavity prototyping, should be factored in to a company’s decision to pursue a lighter weight bottle or jar when lightweighting is an option.”
Keeping a trim package weight is a top consideration for Alcan Packaging Beauty. The company currently markets three lightweight options that are also environmentally friendly. Slender tubes are marketed to be “the lightest flip-top oriented cap for tubes.” The oriented dispensing cap provides top performance and design appeal while respecting the environment, thanks to the significant material usage reduction achieved by the company’s technical teams. The transparent cap is available in both matte and gloss, with a large range of dispensing orifices. It can be enhanced with custom colors (including pearl and iridescent) and custom hot stamp band decoration.
Alcan’s Access Denied is a dual-function flip-top cap for tubes. In addition to dispensing product, the cap features a tear-off band that is integrated into the cap design for tamper-resistance, eliminating the need for an additional shrink sleeve.
And finally, the company also developed an environmentally friendly plastic tube with a sleeve made from up to 60% post consumer recycled (PCR) material. Its multilayer structure guarantees perfect compatibility with bulks as only the outer layer is PCR material, while the inner layer is still made from virgin material. The PCR plastic tube has the same visual and technical qualities as other items in the company’s tube offering, and is suited to a large choice of diameters, heads and caps, and printing techniques.
Beyond the issues of cost and sustainability, there are other reasons why manufacturers might want to employ lightweight packaging options. “Retailers such as Wal-Mart and Sam’s Clubs are driving many companies to find ways to be sustainable, so even a company that does not have an internal focus on sustainability may need to demonstrate that it is doing something to comply with retailers’ mandates,” says Bielefeldt. “Moving from the heavyweight version of a bottle or jar to a lightweight version can be a simple way to make a change that is very quantifiable on today’s packaging scorecards.”
DeAnn Umland, market manager, personal care & household for Seaquist Closures of Mukwonago, WI, sees the current lightweighting trend as an opportunity that provides her company with the means to “continue to offer differentiation through design while optimizing part weight.” Within the personal care market specifically, the company has focused on the tube top market in offering two new styles to the market that are 20-30% less part weight than traditional designs. “The personal care market has and always will demand differentiation through aesthetics in order to continue to capture consumers’ attention and influence the buying decision,” she says. “Therefore, closures like our two-inch Classic Ultra Snap-On Tube Top offer the best of many worlds: a snap-on tube top that provides finger-recess to front-panel orientation on tubes with an updated finger recess profile in the sophisticated sharper radius edges of the Classic style—and it happens to also use less plastic.”
Whether critical or not in this gloomy economy, it seems as if many packaging companies are taking the trend of package lightweighting in stride, using it as an opportunity to contribute to the pervasive green movement and moreover, to exercise their own design innovation.
