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| CSIRO | SOLVE | Issue 2 Feb 05 | |
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MANUFACTURING
Sunscreen for the Amber Fluid
By Graeme O'Neill
A new formula protects the contents of bottles form damaging light.
Green bottles can sometimes be just as transparent as clear glass bottles to damaging wavelengths of ultraviolet and visible violet, indigo and blue light. Aside from beer, some clear and green bottles may also leave certain wines, medicines, personal care products and vegetable oils vulnerable to light-induced damage. To counter this, CSIRO’s research team at CMIT in Clayton, Victoria, has developed a transparent coating for glass bottles that screens the contents from damaging light. It has the potential to revolutionise the way bottles are produced because of a novel way in which the light screen coating is applied – as an anti-scuff scratch-resistant coating during the mass production of the bottles. It means that tomorrow’s tipple may now come in an eye-catching, transparent green bottle – the colour transmitted and reflected by nanoparticles of pigments that imbue the glass with a green hue, while absorbing the harmful UV and blue wavelengths of visible light. Driving the development of this vision is the founder of Bottle Magic Australia Pty Ltd, Mr Imre Lele. Bottle Magic has previously built and run a plant in Adelaide to strip the anti-scuff coating from wine bottles (a quarter of a million a week) and replace it with a more attractive, multicoloured opaque finish. Mr Lele believes the new bottles will appeal to food and beverage manufacturers because consumers already associate greenness with freshness. The transparency is another plus because it allows consumers to see the bottle’s contents. The team at CSIRO took three years to develop and optimise the sunscreen formula. The pigment nanoparticles are made with a proprietary technology that produces an average particle diameter of only 30 nanometres (one nanometre equals one billionth of a metre). The visible spectrum of light spans wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometres. Bottled beverages and foods are damaged by wavelengths between 200 nanometres (near-ultraviolet) and 450 nanometres (blue). The nanoparticles in CSIRO’s formula absorb the more energetic wavelengths between near ultraviolet (200 nanometres) and green (550 nanometres), while allowing harmless yellow to red wavelengths to pass through the coated glass. As a result, it yields the same protection to contents as the traditional amber bottle used for beer, vitamins etc., or blue medicine bottle, while allowing the consumer to see the contents. Beyond basic green, the CSIRO technology allows the sunscreen formula to be modified with admixtures of other pigments, to create virtually any hue in the visible spectrum. It will allow wine and food companies, cosmetics manufacturers and even pharmaceutical companies that currently must use opaque containers to combine fashion with function in pursuit of a marketing edge. 'Tomorrow's tipple may now come in an eye-catching, transparent green bottle' The sunscreen’s nanoparticles are so efficient at absorbing harmful wavelengths of light that only tiny quantities of the pigments are required. Bottle Magic has built a pilot plant in Adelaide to scale up the UV-visible light-screen coating technology; the protective layer is sprayed on to the bottles on the production line after they emerge from the annealing oven. The company plans to launch the sunscreen coating in the high-volume markets of the northern hemisphere – Europe or the US will be first – before introducing it to the relatively small Australian market.
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There
may be something worse than warm beer: beer that has
developed off-flavours after ‘light
strike’. The unpalatable truth,
according to Richard Harris
at CSIRO Manufacturing and
Infrastructure Technology (CMIT), is that
some fashionable green beer bottles may not
always keep Australia’s favourite amber fluid
in pristine condition.
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