Vitalis PET bottle

About the Product

Company: Logoplaste Innovation Lab
Product Phase: Available
Product Type: Lightweight PET bottle

Inspiring Strategy

Spiral fibers strengthen tree trunks: whitebark pine >

Product or process

Vitalis produces a new bottle that is lighter than traditional PET bottles, and provides a strong brand identity. Vitalis one of the major bottled water brands in Portugal. In 2009 Unicer, the brand owner, challenged Logoplaste Innovation Lab to create a new range of PET bottles with an exclusive design that would establish a strong emotional link with the consumer, and be the lightest PET water bottles on the market, fitting their existing industrial filling lines and actively reducing their environment impact.

Challenges solved

The traditional engineering solution to lower the weight of PET bottles is to add horizontal structures. The more you add, the stronger and lighter the bottle will be. The drawback of this recipe is that it ends with an industrial looking bottle, where brand values become secondary.

Differences from existing products

The new range of 100% recyclable PET bottles (33cl, 50cl and 1.5L) were released in the spring of 2010. Unicer, the brand owner, now exports Vitalis to a wide range number of regions in Western Europe, Africa, Latin America, United States, and Canada. The new bottles play an active role in the consolidation of both brand identity and sustainability strategies of Vitalis, allowing the saving of 250 tons of raw material per year.

The biomimicry story

The Logoplaste Innovation Lab team conducted biomimicry research looking for alternative and more effective and sustainable solutions in nature. AskNature.org, the website created by The Biomimicry Institute, was a precious source of information, allowing Logoplaste to speed up the research process. From several potential solutions analyzed, one stood out as being the most inspirational and effective--the spiral growth principle of the fibers of the whitebark pine tree.

Based on the natural model of spiral growth, they developed a new design for the structures of the main body of the bottle, developing helical structures whose inclination angles vary according to the amount of vertical and horizontal strength needed at a certain surface curvature of the bottle.

The Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulations demonstrated that the new structures were in fact more effective in achieving the reduced weight goal than the traditional horizontal engineering structures. In the end, Logoplaste Innovation Lab was able to create not only a new exclusive bottle design, tightly linked to Vitalis brand values, but simultaneously developed the lightest PET bottles on the market.