Water brand teams with KHS on Germany's first recycled PET bottle

KHS Group says using 100 percent recycled PET for water bottles did not pose engineering design challenges and didn’t require adaptations to its stretch blow molder.

*Photo courtesy of KHS Group*

Germans can buy water in bottles made of 100 percent recycled PET for the first time, KHS Group filling and packaging says.

KHS helped with design and production of the bottles for water sold by the brand called share, which wants to fill about a million a month in 2019. The Berlin startup, which provides a person in need drinking water for a day for each bottle purchased, says using recycled PET will save more than 200 metric tons of plastic waste annually.

During development, subsidiary KHS Corpoplast in Hamburg drew on experience from designing 4,000 bottles through its Bottles & Shapes consultancy.

Using recycled material did not pose any unusual challenges, says Marc Eysel, responsible for Northern Europe sales at KHS Corpoplast. “Manufacture is actually simpler as the material’s darker color makes the preforms easier to heat than PET bottles made of virgin material.”

Still and carbonated water is bottled using the KHS InnoPET Blomax stretch blow molder, with no special adaptations necessary, Eysel says. Other partners working with share are bottler Allgäuer Alpenwasser and preform manufacturer Plastipak.

Interest among beverage producers is growing, and a number of bottlers considering increasing recycled PET have contacted KHS, Eysel says.

For more information, visit pet.khs.com

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Rose Shilling is a previous managing editor of Food Engineering Magazine. She wrote feature stories on a variety of topics and tracked the food packaging industry. A journalist with an editing background at news services and newspapers, she also has driven editorial projects in health care and higher education.