Packaging Lightweighting: Coca-Cola Bottles Lose Weight

A key challenge for plastic bottle manufacturers is balancing the environmental harms of single-use plastic waste with bottle performance and functionality.

This involves continuous efforts to reduce environmental harms through sustainable practices like lightweighting.

Lightweighting is a sustainable packaging design practice that results in source reduction, or eliminating waste before it is even created. Through lightweighting, the amount of plastic in a particular packaging component, such as a bottle or cap, is reduced, ideally without adversely affecting the component’s performance or functionality.

Coca-Cola recently embarked on an ambitious lightweighting project. Through extensive collaboration with bottlers, suppliers, and design teams, they successfully reduced the weight of their PET plastic bottle offerings in the U.S. and Canada, including 12, 16.9, and 20 oz. sizes of Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Fanta. This achievement will substantially reduce the consumption of virgin plastic, eliminating the equivalent of 800 million bottles after the rollout is complete. This source reduction will also lower carbon emissions, equivalent to taking 17,000 cars off the road for an entire year. Before unlocking these environmental benefits, the Coca-Cola team had to ensure that lightweighting would not adversely impact beverage quality or the sturdiness of the plastic bottles. We salute the Coca-Cola team for overcoming these hurdles and making a positive environmental impact.

The packaging experts at KGI have been assisting customers with lightweighting projects for nearly two decades. We are best-known for our contributions in the beverage sector, where we have promoted the use of lighter-weight packaging components to achieve source reduction and cost savings for our customers.

For instance, we have transitioned many customers from using a 28mm PCO 1810 or 1816 tamper-evident neck finish to a shorter and lighter-weight 28 PCO 1881 neck finish. More recently, we have transitioned customers using the 28mm PCO 1881 neck finish to an even lighter 29mm (29/25) tamper evident neck finish. Although these projects typically involve a modest upfront investment to accommodate the switch to a different neck finish, the payback period is short, and the source reduction is stunning—as high as a 30-50% reduction in plastic waste depending on the incumbent package. Of course, bottle performance and functionality did not suffer during the transition.

If you are interested in lightweighting your packaging components, contact us today!