How Plastic Soda & Water Bottles are Produced
Plastic, while being claimed as ‘recyclable’, in it’s most common use only contains 10% recycled content, mostly because plastic loses some of it’s inherent properties as it’s re-used.
Aluminum cans, on the other hand, have a 100% recycled content, and a 100% life-cycle, meaning they can be reused endlessly as new aluminum cans. They also won’t break under normal use, and the metal acts as better insulators of the contents inside.
Still, the plastic bottle you hold in your hand did not start out in the shape it is currently. They are formed in a plastic molding machine, from plastic ‘blanks’, pictured below.
In the above photo, a person holds a typical 2-liter blank before it’s heat-formed to the much larger size you expect. The blank is measured and formed to weigh a specific amount to provide adequate strength and tension to do it’s job.
Below are pictures of other typical ‘blank’ bottle forms from a local manufacturer with a dollar bill for scale.
The best way to demonstrate the forming process is with this embedded video below from Discovery Channel’s How It’s Made, which shows you how they go from tiny blanks to nearly any size plastic bottle! I’m a big fan How It’s Made and think it’s one of the best educational shows on TV today! It demystifies the building process in quick 7-minute segments.
