Ketchup maker Heinz has spent nine years, 185,000 product development hours, 45 iterations, and $1.2 million creating a new version of its plastic bottle cap that can be treated at recycling plants — and that new bottle is now available to customers in the U.K.
What makes the new Heinz bottle cap different from the old version is that the new cap is made from only one material: mono-material polypropene (PP). The old cap used multiple types of plastic, including a difficult-to-recycle silicone material for the valve that controls how much ketchup comes out, meaning that recycling facilities needed to physically separate the silicone from the rest of the cap to process it.
Now, Heinz bottles will feature caps that shouldn't register as being particularly different to customers but could save hundreds of millions of bottle caps every year from ending up in landfills.
The design won Rigid Pack of the Year for Kraft Heinz at the 2023 U.K. Packaging Awards.
A spokesperson for plastic packaging maker Berry Global told The Cool Down that the cap was designed by Heinz and then developed and manufactured from there by its team.
"Heinz set us the kind of challenge that suits us and our development departments best: to reconstruct the design of the cap to make it 100% recyclable, without affecting the performance that millions of consumers know and love," said Matthias Hammersen, a sales director at Berry Global. "We're delighted that the finished result exceeds our initial expectations and actually improves the consumer experience."
In addition to making its bottle caps 100% recyclable, Heinz has also set a goal of reducing its use of virgin plastic globally by 20% (which would amount to more than 100 million fewer pounds) by 2030.
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This type of innovation could easily spread across other industries that use plastic bottles for products like shampoo and lotion, which would make a significant difference in the amount of plastic waste we send to landfills.
"We can't continue to do things as we have in the past," said Rashida La Lande, Executive Vice President, Global General Counsel, and Chief Sustainability and Corporate Affairs Officer at Kraft Heinz. "We are investing in innovative technologies and partnerships that are critical to helping us redesign packaging, eliminate unnecessary plastic, increase our use of recycled content, and influence the adoption of reuse models."
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