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Sidel is offering tooling for a new PET bottle base, called StarLITE-R Still, which it claims is a unique answer to today’s market priorities. According to Mikael Derrien, Sidel’s manager of Packaging Innovations, “Today there are bottle bases on the market suitable for lightweight designs and high production speeds. However, they’re designed for virgin PET bottles. Sidel’s Star-LITE-R Still is the only solution on the market specifically developed to address recycled PET that achieves the high performance necessary in this competitive market space.”

Like other members of the StarLITE-R series, this base design is designed for virgin PET or up to 100% rPET. The newest “Still” version is aimed at still water, juices, milk and edible oil from 0.25 L up to 2.5 L. The most recent previous entries were StarLITE-R Premium for thicker premium rPET bottles and StarLITE-R Nitro for nitrogen-dosed still products, both released last year. They followed the original StarLITE-R for CSD in 2023.

The newest bottle base mold features optimized venting for easy shaping at up to 20% lower blowing pressures (down to 16 bar), which saves energy in production. Further, an efficient base cooling circuit is tailored for rPET, which tends to be processed at higher temperatures. The base’s rounded edge design is said to increase resistance to defects such as bursts during blowing, a feature especially important for thinner lightweight bottles. Also, high base clearance prevents deformation, enhancing bottle stability, according to Sidel.

The Still base is compatible with a wide range of bottle weights down to a featherweight 7 g for a 500-ml format. It can be used with transparent or white PET. StarLITE-R Still supports single-serve production rates up to 2,700 bottles per hour per mold and multiserve rates up to 2,400 bph per mold on Sidel’s EvoBLOW, Universal and Series 2 stretch-blow molders.