Styrene Offers 'Inexpensive' Alternative With Beverages

Chemical giant BASF has joined forces with Alpla to develop a bottle for milk and yoghurt beverages using impact-resistant polystyrene (PS-I). This is said to show that polystyrene offers an 'inexpensive alternative' for packaging in this sector. BASF's polystyrene type BX 3580, specially optimised for this application, can be processed by injection-blow-moulding and injection-stretch-blow-moulding on the same machines employed for PET. The company says that the advantage for packaging producers is that, compared with PET, the lower density of polystyrene can 'slash material costs by up to 25 per cent'.