Nature's way with PET

ZEALOUS consumers cite the PET bottle as a blight to the environment and mankind, and blog incessantly against its usage. So far, these entreaties have fallen on deaf ears. PET packaging consumption continues to rise, especially in Asia Pacific (see report on page 28), and no slowdown is expected over the next five years. Package developers and major users are not too deaf to the call for redesign towards less material waste and better recyclability. Lightweighting has been the norm for several years, as has development of plant-based sources for plastic, in order to reduce carbon footprint.
Using less material for PET bottles requires the construction of horizontal structures or ribs – the more you add, the stronger and lighter the bottle will be; however, the drawback of this recipe is that it ends with an industrial-looking bottle, where brand values become secondary. To depart from this route, Logoplaste Innovation Lab looked to Nature for inspiration. The Portugal-headquartered rigid plastic packaging manufacturer is perhaps the first to ever use biomimicry to design a PET bottle, and to tap AskNature, the website created by The Biomimicry Institute and the online inspiration source for the biomimicry community.
Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf.  The core idea is that Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more.

Taking Inspiration from a Gnarly Tree
In 2009 Unicer, the brand owner of Vitalis, one of the major bottled water brands in Portugal, challenged Logoplaste to create a new range of PET bottles with an exclusive design that would establish a strong emotional link with the consumer, and be the lightest PET water bottles on the market, yet would fit their existing industrial filling lines and actively reduce their environment impact.
The Logoplaste Innovation Lab team conducted biomimicry research looking for alternative and more effective and sustainable solutions in nature. AskNature.org was a precious source of information, allowing Logoplaste to speed up the research process. From several potential solutions analysed, one stood out as being the most inspirational and effective – the spiral growth principle of the fibres of the whitebark pine tree (Pinus albicaulis Engelm).
Based on the natural model of spiral growth, they developed a new design for the structures of the main body of the bottle, developing helical structures whose inclination angles vary according to the amount of vertical and horizontal strength needed at a certain surface curvature of the bottle.
The Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulations demonstrated that the new structures were in fact more effective in achieving the reduced weight goal than the traditional horizontal engineering structures. In the end, Logoplaste Innovation Lab was able to create not only a new exclusive bottle design, tightly linked to Vitalis brand values, but simultaneously developed the lightest PET bottles on the market.
Today, Vitalis comes in a new bottle that is lighter than traditional PET bottles, and provides a strong brand identity. The new ranges of 100% recyclable PET bottles (33cl, 50cl and 1.5L) were released in the spring of 2010. Unicer, the brand owner, now exports Vitalis to a wide range number of regions in Western Europe, Africa, Latin America, United States, and Canada. The new bottles play an active role in the consolidation of both brand identity and sustainability strategiAir Jordan XI 11 Wool