The Canmaker - Huge expansion in bottle can production planned

January 12: Growth in the use of resealable aluminium bottles for drinks is expected to expand massively with the installation of three huge factories over the next three years.
Exal Corporation, the US-based leading manufacturer of aluminium aerosol cans and bottles, has developed a high-speed production system that will enable each of the plants to have a capacity of four billion containers a year.
These will be made using a development of drawn and wall-ironed techniques (D&I) and producing bottles at up to 3,000 per minute, enabling them to be competitive on cost with plastics but with better graphics.
In a total investment estimated at around $200 million, the plants will use an upgraded version of Exal’s Coil-to-Can (C2C) production process.

President of Exal Delfin Gibert told The Canmaker that the three factories will be built in the US, Europe and China making bottles for customers on the beer and soft drinks industries.
The first plant is due to open by the end of 2007 at a new site at Youngstown. It will feature an undisclosed number of manufacturing lines with speeds of 1,500 and 3,000cpm, explained Gibert.
Exal’s C2C pilot line was commissioned in 2004 and since then has been under development. “After almost three years of solving problems, we are now able to reach speeds of 1,500cpm,” said Gibert. “The first line of this type will be at our new plant in the US. These are more flexible lines than the ones the industry is used to,” said Gibert who declined to reveal details of the technology, which is expected to use a combination of D&I techniques with newly developed high-speed shaping and finishing systems.
The second plant will be built in Europe for completion in September 2008 and another at a greenfield site in China a year later.
Asked about his confidence on market demand, Gibert said: “How many beverage cans are needed in the world… 220 billion? Twelve billion bottles represent less than six percent, so it isn’t much.”
Last year Exal made one billion impact-extruded aluminium aerosol cans and 300m bottles at its plants in the US, Argentina, France and the Netherlands. Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola have been using Exal’s bottles for brands such as Coca-Cola Lovebeing, Coca-Cola Blak, Anheuser World Select, Michelob and Budweiser.
Production in 2007 is expected to reach 1.6bn containers, including 500m bottles, said Gibert.
High-speed bottle can manufacturing started in Japan in 2000 with Takeuchi Press Industries whose process for necked screw-top cans was licenced to Mitsubishi, Hokkai (now merged as UCC) and Showa and is being used by Ball Corporation in the US for the first time this year.
Also in Japan, Daiwa is making polyester-laminated bottles in a technique that is also being used in the US for aerosol cans. More than five billion are made in Japan every year.
Rexam is also developing a D&I process for making bottles in the US and Europe in collaboration with Belvac Production Machinery.
Aluminium canstock supplier Novelis has also developed a high-pressure blow forming system for bottles called Pressure Ram Forming (PRF).
* Italian production equipment manufacturer Frattini has patented a design for a machine that will neck, shape and finish metal bottles at high speed. Published last September, the patent covers a system for processing containers with a number of 12-pocket rotary heads, enabling a flexible range of operations that can be added or subtracted as required, from 5 to 50.
The patent acknowledges that current beverage can necking systems are simple and fast and aerosol necking systems complex and slow. The new design combines the best features of both in a continuous process.
President of Frattini SpA Roberto Frattini said that the development was secret and details would be revealed when the production version was launched.