3/15/2024

Ketchup maker Heinz has spent nine years, 185,000 product development hours, 45 iterations, and $1.2 million creating a new version of its plastic bottle cap that can be treated at recycling plants — and that new bottle is now available to customers in the U.K.

What makes the new Heinz bottle cap different from the old version is that the new cap is made from only one material: mono-material polypropene (PP). The old cap used multiple types of plastic, including a difficult-to-recycle silicone material for the valve that controls how much ketchup comes out, meaning that recycling facilities needed to physically separate the silicone from the rest of the cap to process it.

Now, Heinz bottles will feature caps that shouldn’t register as being particularly different to customers but could save hundreds of millions of bottle caps every year from ending up in landfills.

The design won Rigid Pack of the Year for Kraft Heinz at the 2023 U.K. Packaging Awards.

The cap was designed by plastic packaging maker Berry Global. “Heinz set us the kind of challenge that suits us and our development departments best: to reconstruct the design of the cap to make it 100% recyclable, without affecting the performance that millions of consumers know and love,” said Matthias Hammersen, sales director — food market at Berry Global. “We’re delighted that the finished result exceeds our initial expectations and actually improves the consumer experience.”

Published by: https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/heinz-ketchup-bottle-cap-recyclable/