Plastic bottle options at BottleStore.com – how to pick the right one?

If you are a regular visitor of our parent company’s blog insight.oberk.com, you might’ve read a post about finding the right plastic bottles for your product. In that article we went into technical details about common plastic resins and their properties such as moisture barrier, oxygen barrier, resistant to sunlight, alcohol, and essential oil flavor.

To help you understand how these properties affect your product, we’ve attached the same table below for reference:

	PET	HDPE	PVC	LDPE	PP	PS
CLARITY	Clear	Translucent	Clear	Translucent	Translucent	Clear
MOISTURE BARRIER	Fair to Good	Good to Excellent	Fair	Good	Good to Excellent	Poor to Fair
OXYGEN BARRIER	Good	Poor	Good	Poor	Poor	Fair
DISTORTION TEMPERATURE	145°F	160°F	150°F	160°F	200°F	150°F
RIGIDITY	High	Moderate	High	Low	Moderate	High
RESISTANCE TO IMPACT	Excellent	Excellent	Good	Excellent	Fair	Poor
RESISTANCE TO COLD	Good	Excellent	Fair	Excellent	Poor to Fair	Poor
RESISTANCE TO SUNLIGHT	Good	Fair	Poor to Good	Fair	Fair	Poor to Fair
RESISTANCE TO ACIDS	Fair	Good	Good	Medium	Good	Medium
RESISTANCE TO ALCOHOL	Good	Good	Very Good	Good	Good	Fair
RESISTANCE TO ALKALIS	Poor	Very Good	Good	Very Good	Very Good	Good
RESISTANCE TO SOLVENTS	Good	Poor	Good	Poor	Poor	Poor
RESISTANCE TO ESSENTIAL OIL FLAVOR	Good	Poor	Good	Poor	Poor to Fair	Poor
EXAMPLES

To better guide you in finding the right plastic bottle at BottleStore, let’s revisit some of the points raised in the original post.

Color

For small or carton quantities, color choices is rather limited. Mostly it is determined by what is available. Some suppliers do stock different color bottles, but you will most likely find natural plastic colors along with white to be commonly available. Generally speaking, PET, PVC and PS plastic resins are generally clear, while HDPE, LDPE and PP resins are not. Therefore you’ll find “natural” color listed as the color attribute for these bottles.

While you can spray coat the plastic bottle as a decorating process, but the end result will still look a little different then if the bottle was made with colorant in the resin itself.

Squeezable?

You will find most LDPE bottle to be highly squeezable, which is good for liquid or creamy product with dispensing closure options. Many HDPE and PET bottles are also squeezable, but you’ll find PET to be generally more rigid then HDPE. This is particularly important to those of you who apply labels to the bottle and panel collapse became an issue. While there are many causes for panel collapse such as environmental conditions (altitude, relative humidity, etc.), fill process, and gas permeation. Higher bottle rigidity (PET bottles) generally have lesser paneling issues than LDPE.

Recyclability

No doubt we are all thinking about the environmental effect our products have, generally speaking, the less plastic you use, the less waste you generate. It is good to know that if you choose a PET or HDPE plastic bottle, it is highly recyclable. However, plastic bottles made of recycled material is not as available as bottles made of new resin due to many reason, and here at BottleStore we currently only carry plastic bottle made of new resin. If your requirement includes PCR materials, call us. Or look for glass alternative as it is commonly manufactured with recycled materials in the mix.

 How can we help?

If you have a specific question on plastic bottles and containers, how to pick the right one, if you have a cool package that you want to share, comment below!