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SPE Thermoforming Quarterly®

Third Quarter 2025

Advancing Sustainable Beverage Closures: CapForming PET

While PET has proven successful in package manufacturing, forming PET caps presents unique challenges. Features such as tamper-evident bands often have thin wall thicknesses, and even top wall thicknesses are commonly reduced as low as 0.5 mm, resulting in a low wall thickness-to-flow length (t/L) ratio, a critical factor influencing mold filling performance (Kalpakjian & Schmid, 2009). In conventional injection molding (IM) and compression molding (CM) of PET, achieving consistent flow and dimensional stability has been difficult, leading to limited adoption of PET closures at scale…

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Third Quarter 2025

How Equipment-as-a-Service Is Reshaping Industrial Markets

Over the past decade, a quiet but profound shift has taken place across manufacturing and industrial markets. What began as a fringe concept rooted in jet engine leasing and printer contracts has evolved into a full-fledged business model reshaping how equipment is sold, deployed, and supported. That model is Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS), and it’s changing the rules of engagement for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), distributors, integrators and their customers…

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