After researching Origin Materials (NASDAQ: ORGN) for my article Origin’s Biomaterials Alchemy: Converting Wood Chips Into Real Plastic, I was excited to listen into the firm’s full-year 2024 earnings conference. When I did, though, it left me deeply unsettled. The company said nothing about its biomaterials technology, the part of its business I was most excited about. Instead, the entire call focused on Origin’s caps and closures business. Producing PET bottle caps represents the company’s best hope of generating near-term cash flows, but I didn’t consider it as compelling from either a technological or a sustainability standpoint. A discussion with youthful co-founder and CEO John Bissell changed my mind.
Anyone who appreciates a great designer’s improvement on a commonplace item can understand the brilliance of Origin’s PET bottle caps for single-use water and carbonated beverage bottles.
Bottle cap technology
Most bottle caps for single-use bottles are made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE). When an HDPE cap is tightened on a bottle, plastic from the cap squishes into the mouth of the bottle, creating a strong seal.
The problem with HDPE bottle caps is that they are not made from PET, the plastic from which bottles are made. When HDPE and PET are melted down together during the recycling process, the resultant plastic is of lower quality due to impurities introduced by the HDPE. To solve this problem, recyclers must buy and mix in “virgin” PET manufactured in petrochemical plants from a mined hydrocarbon feedstock. This makes the recycling process more expensive, less efficient and less ecologically friendly.
Until Origin started working on the problem, no one made bottle caps from PET because of its rigidity. PET caps don’t squish into the mouths of bottles and never form as good a seal as HDPE caps.
Consumers care about products’ ecological impact, so large consumer product goods companies like Coke and Nestle are always looking for ways to reduce their products’ environmental impact. They would have embraced the enhanced recyclability of PET bottle caps long ago, but no one thought it could be done.
Origin’s bold rethinking of PET bottle caps
The mark of a great designer is their willingness to question conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom dictates that bottle caps must be squishy to enable bottles to seal against the “ceilings” of their caps.
Origin’s designers, knowing that PET’s fundamental properties were its density and rigidity, decided to create a cap that functioned more like a cork. The Origin PET cap has a furrow around the top of the cap where the bottle fits, then a shelf that slips into the mouth of the bottle and creates a seal with a much greater surface area than that offered by an HDPE cap.
The company has a good video showing Origin’s CapFormer manufacturing lines in which you can see a couple shots of the PET bottle caps themselves.
PET is much denser and more rigid than HDPE, so PET caps require less plastic and are lighter.
You may not spend your days and nights thinking about why bottle caps are so heavy, but I guarantee that someone at every CPG company thinks about that for at least eight hours a day. When you ship out billions of units, every gram in reduced weight translates into big savings in transportation costs and big cuts in carbon emissions.
Of course, PET caps’ facilitation of higher efficiency recycling is a big ecological win.
Bissell tells me that the company’s caps are presently going through a large customer’s final qualification process, during which the customer configures their equipment to use the newer, lighter caps and performs tests to ensure that they are maintaining 6-sigma quality control. The client, Bissell says, is excited about the trials and satisfied with the quality of the caps.
If all goes well with these qualifications, it’s just a matter of time before the public will be holding frosty beverages sealed with Origin PET bottle caps… just be sure to throw it in a recycle bin when you’re done with it! If you are interested in Origin’s business, please see our recent detailed report that looks at the company’s history, technology, competitive environment, climate impact, and business model.
DISCLOSURE: The author of this article holds a small position in Origin Materials’ stock which makes up a negligible proportion of the author’s net worth. The position was entered into at the beginning of 2025 at a price of roughly $1.20 per share. Nothing in this article should be construed as an inducement for a reader to take a position in the stock nor as an implicit or explicit endorsement of the company’s strategy or of the relative value of the stock.
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