Honest Tea has become the first company to adopt Graham Packaging's lightweight PET bottle for hot-fill products.

 

The Escape uses around 22% less resin than the firm's previous bottle, which the organic bottled tea firm expects to save some 450,000kg of PET over the course of the year.

 

Seth Goldman, Honest Tea president and 'TeaEO', said packaging had been the firm's biggest challenge in minimising its environmental footprint. "This is the single largest improvement we've ever taken in terms of reducing our environmental impact."

 

The bottle is processed using Graham's continuous motion activator. Once a bottle is filled and capped, it is inverted to take up the vacuum in the bottle and create slight overpressure.

 

The process gives the bottle a rigid feel, and can be easily fitted into a filling line as it doesn't require a separate operator. "It's the equivalent of putting a labelling machine into a bottling line," said Graham PET business manager Mark Leiden.

 

The new Honest Tea bottles are set to hit shelves by the middle of June and Graham said several other drinks customers were finalising designs to use the product, which is also suitable for jams and sauces.