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Lightweight Dairy Jugs Significantly Cut HDPE Usage

United Dairy replaces standard gallon milk jugs and saves 1.7 million pounds of plastic in less than two years.

LGIHTER IS BETTER. Empty 1-gal ECOJUGS™ weigh 52 g versus about 62 g for more traditional 1-gal dairy jugs.
LGIHTER IS BETTER. Empty 1-gal ECOJUGS™ weigh 52 g versus about 62 g for more traditional 1-gal dairy jugs.

United Dairy, Inc., an independent, family-owned business with processing/packaging plants in Martins Ferry, OH, Charleston, WVA, and Uniontown, PA, markets milk, juice, tea, punch, and water products in lightweight dairy jugs developed and patented by Mid-America Machining. The dairy, which sells branded and private label products to retailers in nine States (Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maryland), decided to brand the 1-gal container as ECOJUG™.

Mid-America Machining specifically developed the bottles to reduce the amount of HDPE needed to produce reliable packaging, while also minimizing the operational line changes users would need to make to accommodate the lighter-weight containers. The average traditional 1-gal HDPE dairy bottle weighs about 60-62 g. The 1-gal ECOJUGS weigh 52 g each. These jugs also are designed to be easier to grip, vent, and pour. United Dairy produces ECOJUGS using 6-head extrusion blow-molding equipment (Model 350 R) from Uniloy.

Producing the lightweight dairy jugs

Peter Lobbestael, VP of Sales for Mid-America Machining, explains, “The minimum wall thickness of the previous jug has been maintained. The focus of the packaging material reduction was to eliminate unnecessary thicker areas inherent in the old jug design. This goal was achieved through a combination of the new patented bottle design geometry, as well as the patented extrusion tooling design. The new cavity geometry maintains the dairy supply chain envelope, while limiting the amount of parison stretch required. This enables us to re-establish what is achievable with the weight-to-strength ratio for light-weight HDPE bottles. The result is a much more uniform wall thickness distribution, and refrigerated shelf life protection has not been compromised.”