At present, the total annual beer production in the world has reached 150 billion liters. After a huge consumption of beer, it is a huge container market. The number of beer containers consumed each year now exceeds 270 billion. With the increasing demand from consumers for quality products and convenient packaging, PET bottles are gradually entering the beer packaging market due to their advantages of light weight, transparency, shatterproofness, ease of molding, and resealability.
Beer is highly sensitive to the environment and therefore requires high barrier properties for packaging materials. To improve barrier properties, PET bottle manufacturers usually solve this problem by adding a barrier layer to the walls of the multilayer bottle, improving PET bottle performance by blending or using additives, and using SiOx plasma coating. But regardless of the method used, the biggest challenge is how to produce the best barrier at the lowest cost. The multi-layer PET bottles produced by the above method have good barrier properties, but the production process is complicated and the cost is relatively high, which becomes a bottleneck for large-scale promotion and application.
Currently, single-layer PET bottles that improve barrier properties by blending or using additives are gaining attention. For example, INV ISTA has successfully developed PolyShidld, a polyester resin with excellent gas barrier properties, which has made breakthroughs in the production technology of PET beer bottles. The technology that originally used multiple layers to make PET beer bottles will be replaced. , as long as a single layer can be made.
It is reported that PolyShied is a new kind of PET blend resin with oxygen absorption and gas barrier properties. The single-layer PET beer bottle produced by it has recently been approved by the EU beer packaging food safety related laws and can be directly used for beer packaging. . PolyShied single-layer PET beer bottles can significantly increase the barrier to oxygen and carbon dioxide gas and meet all beer shelf life standards. For example, a 500-ml PET beer bottle can provide a shelf life of 120 days, and can achieve a total oxygen intake of less than 1 ppm in one year, and a loss of less than 15% of carbon dioxide in four months. At the same time, due to the use of a phase-solvent technology, the particles of the sheet-like barrier material are made smaller, so that the processed beer bottle also has the transparency of a traditional glass beer bottle, having two colors of green and amber.
The biggest good news for plastic bottle manufacturers is that PolyShied single-layer PET beer bottles can produce preforms on standard, standard injection molding machines without significant additional investment and without increasing the complexity of the production process. Greatly reduced.
For brewers, PolyShied single-layer PET bottles can withstand a pasteurization process of 65°C for 30 minutes. The process is the same as the use of glass beer bottles, while plastic bottles greatly reduce transportation costs and transport operations. Safe and easy, and can achieve different packaging styles (such as large bottle packaging); retailers can also benefit from the PET beer bottle transportation safety and shelf appeal; for consumers, safety, light weight is equally important, the use of PET bottles The realization of the family package is also very welcome. It is reported that the single-layer PET beer bottle production technology has already begun trials in several beer production plants around the world.
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