Coca-Cola Amatil Invests $450M in Blow Fill Technology

Continuing to put technology, innovation and sustainability at the forefront of its efforts, Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) has made a $450 million commitment to install blow fill technology at all of the its production facilities in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Fiji over the next three years.

As part of that commitment, last year $35 million was invested in CCA’s Thebarton production facility in south Australia, marking the company’s largest investment to date in blow fill technology. The investment allows the company to manufacture its own PET bottles at the facility instead of using a third-party supplier, while also using less raw material.
CCA also built a facility in western Sydney to manufacture its own closures and preforms, which began operating in November 2011.

This new investment plays into CCA’s Project Zero, a supply chain investment vehicle across the CCA Group that has been in progress over the past five years, explains Sally Loane, director of media and public affairs for CCA. “[Project Zero] has contributed to earnings through efficiency and service gains, cost reductions and an increase in manufacturing and distribution capabilities,” she says.

The blow fill technology, provided by Krones AG, gives CCA the opportunity to use less energy and increase its use of rPET. As the company continues to roll out the technology across the group and across packaging lines, CCA stands to achieve some of the lightest-weight bottles in the global Coca-Cola system, the company says. Husky supplied the injection molding technology for the preforms and the manufacture of the closures.

“While CCA has achieved some significant sustainability goals over the past five years, including the fact that we are one of the three most efficient users of water in the global Coca-Cola system, the bottle self-manufacture, or blowfill, and the preform and closure manufacturing deliver the biggest goals in savings of carbon, raw materials and water,” notes Loane.
Peter Buchhauser,
area sales director for Krones’
Southeast Asia/Pacific
region, explains that the blow fill technology allows for CCA to eliminate many of the steps it was going through previously using a third-party supplier for its bottles. In addition, he says, “Current state-of-the art lightweight bottles can only run in blow fill blocs. The blow fill blocs have a higher efficiency compared to the old process, where several machines were included, each one having a certain mean time between failures, thus adding to a lower efficiency.”

Savings realized include a reduced carbon footprint of 22 percent for each manufactured bottle due to the use of less raw material in the bottle and closure and the elimination of bottles being transported in from suppliers, according to the company. CCA also estimates it will save 9,000 tons of PET resin across the group each year. CCA already is achieving an 8 percent reduction in water use on the production lines because it doesn’t have to rinse out bottles and the company is manufacturing shorter closures using 30 percent less HDP (High Density Polyethalene). In addition, there has been a reduction in secondary packaging: Labels are 5 percent lighter and the use of cardboard has been reduced by
15 percent.

The new technology, which is not being used on this scale anywhere in Australia, notes Loane, also enables CCA to innovate new bottle designs. The company launched a new lightweight spring water bottle, called Mount Franklin Easy-Crush Bottle, weighing in at 13.1 grams. “It is the lightest PET bottle being manufactured in Australia,” she says.