World’s First Tethered PET Cap Already in Production

What could be better for PET recycling than a tethered cap? A tethered cap made of the same polymer as the bottle.

That’s what Origin Materials has done. On a mission to enable the world’s transition to sustainable materials, the technology company announced this week it designed and is manufacturing the first-of-its-kind tethered PET caps.

The innovative cap enables 100% mono-material PET packaging to improve recycling circularity for the world’s most recycled polymer.

It also addresses legislation for tethered caps. European Union regulations now require that caps stay connected to bottles — and Origin is the only company doing it with recyclable PET plastic.

“The EU Single-Use Plastic Directive, which came into effect last month, mandates that caps stay connected to bottles throughout the European Union,” says John Bissell, Origin co-founder and co-CEO. “Our PET cap innovations are perfectly suited for that regulatory environment—and frankly any environment. We expect many other regions to introduce their own tethered beverage cap requirements as well, following the example of the EU. With our leading PET cap technology and manufacturing systems, we are extremely well positioned to address a $65 billion caps and closures market that consumes billions upon billions of caps per year that today cannot be recycled into new caps, only downcycled.”

Ingenious design locks the opened cap threads with the bottle neck threads. ORIGIN MATERIALS VIA BUSINESS WIRE

The efficient simplicity of same-material cap and bottle.

“If you’re going to keep caps connected to bottles, the logical thing to do is make the cap and the bottle from the same material: PET,” Bissell observes. “Otherwise recycling centers face the problem of separating tethered high-density polyethylene or polypropylene caps from PET bottles. With our solution, caps and bottles can be recycled together easily with no need to separate. That’s a real breakthrough for recycling circularity because it increases purity and keeps valuable, high-performing PET plastic in the loop.”

The tethered PET cap complements Origin’s previously announced PET closure, which is the world’s lightest carbonated soft drink cap compatible with the PCO 1881 neck finish and the first PET cap produced with commercial-scale equipment.

Clever design locks the cap in place.

Origin’s PET caps can be made with any type of PET, whether virgin PET, recycled PET (rPET), or bio-based PET.

“Our patent-pending tethered cap design is simple, clever, and user-friendly,” says Bissell. “We use the threads of the PET cap and bottle to lock the cap into place, angled away from the mouth, not toward it. We are combining the performance and sustainability advantages of our PET caps — recyclability, shelf-life extension, lightweighting, ability to use recycled PET, and enablement of mono-material packaging — with excellent user experience. We already have extremely strong interest in this welcome addition to our PET cap product line.”

You can read PlasticsToday’s previous reports about Origin Materials here.