Coca-Cola’s Redesign of Small PET Bottles Pushes Lightweighting Below Prior ‘Floor’

For the first time in decades, The Coca-Cola Company has completely redesigned its small PET bottles (12, 16.9 and 20 oz) for sparkling Minute Maid Refreshments and Minute Maid Aguas Frescas soft drinks. The new bottle design will also be extended to Coca-Cola brand carbonated drinks in 20-oz, 100% rPET bottles (excluding caps and labels). All three bottle sizes were trimmed by 2.5 g from 21 g to 18.5 g, an 11.9% weight reduction.

This initiative is expected to reduce the company’s use of new PET by more than 30 million lbs in 2025, the equivalent of around 800 million bottles.

Says Alejandro Santamaria, Coca-Cola’s senior director of Global Packaging Development and Innovation, “We’ve been working continuously to ‘right-weight’ our bottles, going incrementally from 27 g to 21 g over the last 10 years through reducing preform thickness without having to change the bottle shape. But we’d reached the ‘floor’ — the older preforms we were using were not conducive to more lightweighting, so we needed to rethink the design completely and create new preform molds to get below 21 g.

“We used this opportunity to refresh and modernize our bottle designs, while incorporating learnings from past lightweighting initiatives — including how to maximize stretching during the blow molding process and how to design our bottles to minimize the number of weak points. We changed the preform shape (aspect ratio) and leveraged multiple breakthroughs in PET bottle designs through computer modeling.

“Once we landed on a preform that worked for all bottles, suppliers’ existing preform equipment was retooled to produce the new 18.5-g preform design, then bottlers supported this sustainability progress by investing in new blow molds.”