* Project to raise awareness of the can’s sustainability revealed
* Could aluminium beverage cans be under threat from PET?
* Market growth underpins the drinks can future
* Bottle can market to develop with volume and premium sectors
* Use the can to save food waste in developing markets

Raising consumer awareness of the can’s strong sustainability message is the objective of a global project being backed by Beverage Can Makers Europe, the US-based Can Manufacturers Institute and Brazilian industry body Abralatas, reported Anders Linde, Rexam’s director of external environmental affairs, at The Canmaker Summit held in Chicago earlier this month.

The beverage can has low distribution costs, long shelf life, is a global concept manufactured locally and has a key benefit that lowers its carbon footprint: it is highly recycled. “The project will keep the beverage can in a star position and make it the preferred drinks packaging for the future,” said Linde.

Aluminium’s competitiveness in the beverage can sector is beginning to be eroded against other packaging materials due to high energy costs that “have fundamentally changed the cost structure of the industry,” warned Uday Patel, principal aluminium consultant at CRU Analysis.

“There’s been a huge increase in capital costs for aluminium – 22 percent in recent years,” he said. Whereas the average capital cost for an aluminium mill is between $2,700 and $2,800 a tonne, explained Patel, for the period 2003-2005 it has risen to $3,800 a tonne and to about $4,600 in 2007. “We are in a prolonged period of capital cost increase.

“There’s a huge opportunity for competing materials against aluminium,” he said. “This has created an opportunity for PET, particularly for carbonated soft drinks.
“In Europe, there is a chance for tinplate to gain market share. In terms of economic costs there is an incentive — whether they’d do it or not is another issue, D&I material is only a fraction off the overall steel products market.”

CRU Analysis and associated researchers PCI PET Packaging Resin & Recycling Ltd have published a report that details the threat presented to the can by PET.
They were responding to an upbeat presentation by Arthur Stupay of Tower Research that showed how customers cannot easily change to other packaging materials from the metal can, the manufacture of which is meeting rising demand despite raw material price rises.

The bottle can market in North America is evolving into two sectors: one for high volumes that will be met by D&I cans like Ball’s and another described by Ed Martin, sales and marketing manager for CCL Container, as a “white space product” in which there was “an opportunity to create value driven by design equity”. It was a market of immediate consumption in bars in which was less price sensitive, he said.
“Nothing does it like the hardest-working pack, the D&I can,” he said. “but there will also be a market for more stylish and better-designed bottles.”

On a more sober note, Neil Robson, a leading specialist on packaging for exports, described how waste is viewed differently between the industrialized world and developing countries. Packaging is equated with waste in the mature markets, while there is a need to reduce food waste elsewhere. Though metal packaging could help reduce food waste, organizations are discouraged because we “cannot be seen to encourage packaging”.

Former Metal Box manager Robson, said, “The packaging sector could prove its worth by concrete contributions to third-world hunger alleviation – and thus gain the moral high ground it rightly deserves.