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Coming Age Closures—Beyond Mere Opening/Reclosing

In his 1977 hit song “Margaritaville,” Jimmy Buffett sang about stepping on a pop-top and cutting his heel.

Ben Miyares

The popularity of his laid-back lifestyle song spawned a multi-billion-dollar empire of restaurants, luxury resorts, tequila, chips, salsa, casinos, and retirement villages. It may also have hastened the development of non-detachable EOEs (Easy Open Ends) on carbonated beverage cans and the emergence of a generation of safer, multi-talented convenience closures that followed.

With safety as an underlying requirement, opening and reclosing convenience is still a major driver of modern closure design and application. But, with an eye to consumer demands and preferences, ambitious packaging managers have been adding several characteristics to their portfolios of closures that go beyond mere opening and reclosing functionality. Some closure characteristics and capabilities we’ve noted of late include:

A tilt toward bio. Petroleum-based polyethylene and polypropylene are common closure materials. Each makes environmental sustainability claims based primarily on its recyclability. Neither, however, matches the “green” credentials of their renewable, plant-based plastics and non-plastics counterparts.

One of those material counterparts is paper. Already enjoying a 57% share of the global disposable cup market, paper will be penetrating deeper into the largely plastic lid sector of the $12 billion market, growing at a compound annual rate of 7.2%.

Paper Machinery Corp., renowned in the market for its cup forming equipment, is introducing one- and two-piece paper lid forming lines to produce paperboard lids from roll stock–round ones for beverage cups and non-rounds for applications ranging from ice cream tubs to hardware and cleaning compound containers.

Another machinery entrant, Tetra Pak, is touting the “green” credentials of the biopolymers in its Tetra Rex Plant based carton (layers of bio-LDPE in its walls; closure molded of bio-HDPE). Bonsucro, a global standard and platform for sugarcane, certifies the sustainability of the biopolymers from Braskem.

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