Aluminum closure sheet is typically used for bottle capping around the world. In China there are two types of raw materials for bottle caps: plastics and aluminum. Although plastics is taking up a larger market share, aluminum has a promising developing prospects in China.
It’s used to be said that the biggest advantage of aluminum closure sheet over plastics lies in its excellent property for anti-fake design. As a matter of fact, however, plastic caps are usually featured by more complicated anti-fake structures. They have diversely processed surface, strong three-dimensional effect, novel appearance as well as good back-flow prevention. In spite of all the advantages above, several intrinsic weaknesses seem to be unsolvable. Owing to the fact that glass bottles from hot forming process demonstrate big errors in neck size, it’s difficult for plastic caps to seal the bottles completely. Besides, plastic powder from ultrasonic welding pollutes the bottled contents frequently, which remains to be solved. What’s more, some manufacturers even mix raw materials with cheap plastics. That makes the pollution even more serious.
In comparison with plastics, aluminum closure sheet has better properties, lower cost, less pollutant and higher recyclable value. Although aluminum caps are generally simple-shaped, they are delicately designed and printed. Costing only a half of plastic caps, they have no pollution at all. Made of a metal well-known for its popularity at reclamation depots, they boast higher recyclable value than plastics. Further more, bottles sealed by aluminum caps can be placed in containers of high temperature for sterilizing. Currently China has nearly 200 cap manufacturers supplying about 9 billion pieces of aluminum caps of hundreds of types. Aluminum caps have strict requirement about strength, elongation rate and size error of aluminum enclosure sheets, which forces manufacturers to adopt aluminum sheets of premium quality.