The PET Bottle Industry Pioneers

Dr. Tom Brady began his career at Owens-Illinois, Inc. in 1972, just as the carbonated soft drink suppliers began asking their package suppliers to create and offer family-sized carbonated beverage containers, which required an industry-wide conversion from glass and aluminum to plastic. As a fledgling senior scientist Tom, along with his O-I colleagues and along with other industry package suppliers accepted the challenge and, over just a short 10 year period, created an entirely new industry to supply sustainable PET packaging to the beverage, food, medical, and personal care product industries.

When O-I abandoned commercialization of the new and successful PET container in 1985 because it was affecting O-I's glass container business, Tom left O-I and founded Plastic Technologies, Inc. with the initial goal of helping the Coca-Cola Company self-manufacture its own PET plastic containers. Over its 40 year history, PTI has become a key technology development supplier and manufacturer of PET packaging for many of the major global brand owners, resin suppliers, and machine manufacturers, and PTI has also emerged as a leading industry resource for training, manufacturing support, recycling technologies, and laboratory testing. As a subsidiary of SIPA Solutions, PTI is still known for developing and commercializing sustainable plastic packaging products and processes.

This book titled "Tom Brady's Historic Plastic Bottle Museum" documents what is perhaps the only collection in the world of many of the very first PET containers that were developed by PTI and by other packaging industry suppliers and fulfills Tom's desire to document the startup and history of the PET packaging industry which has come to dominate the soft drink, food, medical and personal care product industries.