Amcor launches long life milk packaging solution

The bottles are manufactured in Xamos™, a brand new PET based material specifically developed by Amcor PET Packaging Europe. Xamos™ achieves an extremely high opacity at a low thickness that has never been possible before with monolayer PET, allowing the bottles to deliver a four-month minimum shelf life for UHT milk.

Blown on standard Injection Stretch Blow Moulding (ISBM) machines, Xamos™ bottles can be sterilised using both wet and dry methods. In particular, Xamos bottles have shown very good thermal resistance during these aseptic processes.

Xamos™ features a matt soft touch surface, which dairy customers have identified as being more in keeping with a UHT milk bottle than the typical ‘glossy’ finish of traditional PET. Typically lighter than alternative UHT milk bottles, the material offers all the design potential of PET to create distinctive looking bottles for branding purposes.

Furthermore, Xamos™ offers an oxygen barrier that is up 20 times more effective than HDPE.

Thanks to its monolayer construction, Amcor says that the Xamos™ bottles are cost-competitive compared to alternative forms of UHT milk packaging including the traditional carton and other bottle formats in PET and HDPE, which have to be multilayer to achieve the required product protection.

In addition, Xamos™ bottles offer all the traditional consumer benefits of PET – lightweight, easy to handle and convenient. The injected finish with its precise dimensions ensures a tight fitting cap for full reclosability and a leak-free performance without the need for an aluminium seal.