The advantages and development of PE plastic bottles in food packaging

Update:04 Mar 2022

My country's PET production scale is far behind several major foreign manufacturers. In the 1980s, my country gradually introduced from abroad the excellent PET resin synthesis equipment of 10,000 tons to hundreds of thousands of tons, and the quality and output have made great progress. PET bottles are favored by beverage manufacturers and consumers because of their light weight, ease of transportation and portability.


(1) Advantages of PET bottles
1. PET bottles are better than glass beer bottles in terms of safety;
2. PET bottles are light in weight, which is convenient for long-distance transportation of products, which can save transportation costs for beer companies;
3. The portability of PET bottled beer is better than that of cans, and it can better adapt to young people's psychology of seeking new and different;
4. Filling pure draft beer or high-grade beer with low sterilization unit in brown, oxygen-barrier PET bottle can improve the appearance of high-grade beer;
5. PET bottles have great flexibility in the choice of bottle type and capacity, and can produce products of different bottle types and capacities, enriching the variety of products.
In short, PET is cheap, transparent, airtight, good in compressive strength and easy to shape. It not only solves the bottle-shaped design, safety, transportation and other problems of glass containers, but also avoids the shape design and opacity of metal containers. Many of the above characteristics make it more and more widely used in beverage packages.
(2) Defects of PET bottles
1. PET bottles have poor adaptability to beer filling equipment. For example, PET bottles cannot be cleaned with a bottle washer, but can only be washed with high-pressure sterile water, and the sterile state of the bottle cannot be guaranteed (especially for bottles that have been stored for a long time).
2. The impact of PET bottles on the shelf life of beer: after filling, carbon dioxide loses 10%-15%, and oxygen enters the beer to aggravate the aging of the beer. PET bottles need to improve their ability to protect against ultraviolet rays to prevent sunlight odor in beer.
​​(3) PET bottle market
More and more beverages, such as non-carbonated beverages, iced tea, coffee, sports drinks, purified water, pasteurized milk, etc., must maintain good antibacterial properties during the filling process. In recent years, these beverages have increasingly used PET bottles or PP and HDPE bottles as containers. It can be seen that in the next few years, the market for aseptic filling of PET bottles will increase at twice the current rate. At the same time, the competition of liquid food packaging products of different categories tends to be fierce. Aseptic will divide up the market share of pure milk in aseptic pillow paper packaging; high-density polyethylene plastic bottles will compete for the market share of roof paper packaging, yogurt and other products. ; Plastic bottles will also share the share of fruit juice beverages packaged in aseptic paper and so on.