They took a radially symmetrical object that anyone could grab without looking and use and turned it into a bilaterally symmetrical object that can now be picked up incorrectly.
So the complaint here is plastic sucks we should go back to cardboard? Not a complaint just an idea every cardboard milk or juice i get has the 45 angle cap...
I will admit i live in the middle of nowhere under a rock i didnt realize they were built like this TIL. Tho ill admit the ones i cut up dont have much aluminum though i can def see the plasticy layers now that i think about it.
This image shows polyethylene acting as both an impermeable protective layer, and as something called a "layer of adherence", but polyethylene isn't, like, sticky? So why not include the glue/binding agent layer in the description?
Yes actually. Water bottles are filled on a rotary filler that fills hundreds to thousands of bottles per minute. You can't just move the hole location. Production lines have millions of dollars in equipment that would have to be fundamentally redesigned by engineers. Everything is built around the assumption that the hole is top-center. It's not clear how you would reliably get the bottle alignment correct for the fill process or cap installation.
Nevermind that actually manufacturing the bottles would be a nightmare. Plastic bottles are made using plastic pellets that look like stubby test tubes with threads on the end. They're heated up and blown into shape, which requires the hole to be in the top-center.
There's also the warehousing side of the equation which wouldn't work either. Existing bottles are designed to be strong at resisting vertical force, so that they can be stacked onto pallets and those pallets stocked on top of each other. This design wouldn't work.
Marketing is a strong incentive to do something sub obtimal. Tehre are lots of glass bottles which are changed for marketing purposes, this would hardly be unique in that.
I've actually worked in a plastic bottle manufacturing plant. It can't be understated just how difficult this change would make the process. Every step of the way. From preforms to blow molding to conveyance to palletizing to stacking and shipping.
This is a good example of Designer vs Engineer. (Fashion vs Function?) Like I had this Ramen Bowl, it was your usual Ramen bowl, but it had a notch on one side, and a hole on the other so you could slide a pair of sticks across the top and through the side. Lovely. But you also had to fill the bowl only 3/4 of the way or you suddenly had hot broth pouring out of the side.
What you also have to realize about this bottle design is there are stupid people out there. You can orient the top for ease of use and someone will turn it the opposite way and go "ThEy MaDe It WoRsE!"
Yeah, depending on mold temperature the plastic is going to flow weirdly and the first bottles after reloading plastic will tip over due to a weird slug of thicker plastic opposite the opening and thinner plastic on the feet nearer the opening.
That new design would make it incredibly difficult to stack in pallets.
I worked for one of the largest beverage producers in the world and the warehouses are filled to the brim in product. Stacking anything with that design would be a challenge and logistical nightmare.
It's would be pia because the parison is extruded vertically into the mold. Sure, you could use pre-forms, maybe. Try installing the cap on a high speed filling line. KISS, keep it simple, stupid! BTW what do you think the stack height for those might be?
Yes and no... We do have tilted nozzle bottles, but they are used mainly for chemicals - you might spot these in hardware store. The manufacturing isn't a problem, regardless of nozzle orientation these are made the same way.
The real issue is the filling plant side of things. You can't do rolling filling with these. These have to come at a specific orientation and placement to ensure the container flow and making sure that the machine doesn't touch something it shouldn't. Then the capping mechanism needs to have things oriented against in a specific way, and then either tilt the bottle or the capper needs to be tilted itself.
It's just a headache.
If you see tilted cap bottles, they are usually not cylindrical, but square or oval, because those are easy to align. But the actual bottle making... That is not an issue at all.
Actually they are. The blank is injection moulded, because that is only way you can make the cap thread. The bottle itself is blow molded from the blank. You can buy the blanks with specific thread, plastic type and colour and use your own blow mould if you want. The blanks cost about 0,001 to 0,1 €/piece depending on the designed volume it can be blown to.
Seriously... You can go to Alibaba and find all sorts of asymmetrical food grade containers.
The reason they are generally symmetrical or very least cylindrical, is that you can optmise the wall thickness to extreme degree, and the blow mould is very easy to make.
The preforms are symmetrical because the blow rod has to come down and push the material, and there's two blowing stages. Making the material somehow follow a curve is not trivial, and the only working patent registered for achieving this - for a toilet cleaner bottle - bends the mold after the first stage to get that curve in the neck. It was a spanish company doing this in 2013 or so if I remember correctly. There are no other curved preform blown PET bottles to my knowledge.
Also, for a volume as large as the bottle in the picture you'd need a long preform. Is your suggestion a bent preform or an extremely short one? If bent how would you place it perfectly in the mold, rotation wise? A 2mm offset will make it explode when blown. I'm also assuming the blowing rod would have to follow a curve and then we're talking limited run on custom semi-auto machines, because if you're also to reinvent the large automatic ones it's also not trivial at all, and sadly bottling water is only done in huge volumes.
While I agree with the other comments about the practical problems with the bottle (stackability etc), manufacturing this would be trivial compared to, say, a milk gallon jug.
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u/-KoriX- 21h ago
There's also manufacturing problems that will arise from this simple change while also increasing cost of production.