BASF has joined forces with ALPLA, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of plastic beverage bottles, to come up with a bottle for milk and yoghurt beverages using impact resistant Polystyrene (PS-I). BASF’s Polystyrene type BX 3580—specially optimized for this application—can be processed by injection blow molding and injection stretch blow molding on the same machines used for PET. The advantage for packaging manufacturers is that the lower density of polystyrene in comparison to PET can slash material costs by up to 25 percent. Even more energy and money are saved because injection stretch blow molding uses less compressed air; unlike PET, the polystyrene does not have to be pre-dried.
