First-of-its-kind paper bottle machine launches at Cambridge packaging company

A first-of-its-kind paper bottle making machine is now up and running at a packaging company based in Cambridge, Ont.

“It’s the world’s first bottle that can be mass produced and easily used on current filling lines,” said Shawn Bonnick, the president of Kinsbrae Packaging.

“We’re all familiar with the bag and box, and that’s what this is - bag and bottle.”

Kinsbrae Packaging had its first full day of paper bottle creation on Thursday.

The bottle starts off as a flat, 100 per cent post-consumer recycled board. At Kinsbrae Packaging, they print the label directly onto that board. It can be printed around the entire bottle, as well as on the bottom.

“Inside, we have our HDPE nozzle with the PET bladder inside. All of it can be thrown right into your blue bin and recycled,” Bonnick said.

The machine that makes the bottles is from a company called Frugal in the United Kingdom.

Recyclability

The bottle’s recyclability is one of the key factors that Bonnick said caught his attention.

“When you look at the bottle itself, the initial thought is that it’s a paper bottle. Absolutely. It’s environmental. Take the bottle, throw it into your blue bin and call it a day,” he said. “But the process goes much further than that though.”

Because the bottle is lightweight and doesn’t break, Bonnick said it’s beneficial throughout the entire supply chain.

The flat and lightweight nature of the pre-constructed bottles results in much less storage space on trucks and in warehouses.

“With these bottles, we can fit almost 47,000 bottles on a single transport truck. Glass, because of the weight, you’re going to be capped out at less than half of that. So now we can send 200 per cent more bottles on a transport truck than the glass variant,” Bonnick said.

Kinsbrae Packaging president Shawn Bonnick shows one of the first paper bottles to be produced. (Stef Davis/CTV Kitchener)

Boxes of paper bottles also don’t require cardboard dividers, like you’d see in a wine or spirit cases to prevent smashing.

“Then when it gets to the actual end user, where they’re trying to fill the bottles, they no longer need to rinse the bottles with water. They can do it with air and nitrogen instead,” Bonnick said.

“So it’s a much cleaner, safer process and it doesn’t require as much energy to manufacture.”

Georgian Bay, a spirit company based in Ontario, is the owner of the first batch of bottles that was produced at Kinsbrae Packaging on Thursday.

Environmental impact and cost were major reasons why co-founder Denzil Wadds wanted to be involved.

“To ship glass bottles from wherever they’re manufactured, which in some cases is in China, Chile or some of them are manufactured in Italy, it’s very expensive, heavy and it’s a huge impact on the environment,” Wadds said.

“These [paper bottles] are five times lighter than a glass bottle. They have six times less of a carbon footprint than a glass bottle. It’s just a better story. It’s a better product it every way, both from a cost perspective and also from a sustainability perspective.”

Georgian Bay is first using the paper bottles for its gin, but Wadds said he hopes it will eventually be used for “a bit of everything.”

Wadds said the cost to have the paper bottles made is comparable to the cost to make their existing bottles.

Marketing power

Although the paper bottle production is still in its very early days, Bonnick said the response from his customers has been overwhelming.

“When we started it, we really thought it was going to be predominantly in the wine industry. But the spirit industry has surprised drastically in the sense of their early adaptation of the bottle, because that’s going to stand out on the shelf,” he said.

“When you’re walking down an aisle that’s traditionally just been glass with a 4x2 label, this stands out beside it and you tend to gravitate towards this,” said Bonnick.

Wadds said as soon as the team at Georgian Bay learned the entire bottles could be covered, the idea got even more appealing to him.

A paper bottle on the production line. (Stef Davis/CTV Kitchener)

“Not only can we brand the whole bottle, but we can tell the story of the liquid in the bottle,” he said. “It’s just so much better at delivering messages.”

Bonnick said another perk of the paper bottles is that they can be brought into areas where glass bottles are prohibited.

“It is the only bottle that can go into our parks, national parks, across Canada. You can’t bring glass in there,” he said.

In the future, Bonnick hopes to bring two additional machines to Cambridge in order to produce more of the bottles in the future.

He said the Georgian Bay bottles will likely be found in LCBO stores over the next few weeks.

“This is something that when people grab it, they hold it. It's an experience that people are genuinely excited to pick up and bring to their friends and show them ‘hey, did you see this? Look how cool this is,’” Bonnick said.

“It's weird to say that paper bottle packaging is the exciting thing of our world, but it's absolutely is.”