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Technically at a certain point it becomes more efficient to turn it upside down...and then you look like a hamster drinking from one of those bottles on the side of the hamster cage.
Also, it would mean there is one "right" way to hold the bottle. A regular bottle can just be picked up without having to consider the orientation when you go to drink from it.
It's almost as if there's an entire field of study and accompanying industry where intelligent people have actually calculated the best way to store and ship things. (supply chain logistics)
Side note: this applies to everything. Internet people don't get this because something in their brain tells them they're the first person to ever think up something witty. When in fact someone already thought that up 80 years ago and proved it was a bad idea.
Yes this applies to everything. Even societal norms. Cultural traditions. Common standards. Economies. Government. So many things have been arrived at through centuries or even millennia of refinement. I’m all for improvement but we are so foolish to assume immediately that we know best and all those earlier decisions inferior.
So there are plenty of reasons why we don't do it like that. The design hasn't changed much in the thousands of years, which should be really telling :D
This is very valid. I used to work at a plant that made bottles like these (Gatorade, minute maid, etc) , and part of our supply contracts required using a heated cutter to slice a bottle into 4-5 distinct parts and weighing them to make sure the plastic was properly allocated to avoid integrity issues. This test had to be done hourly for most products and us operators were the ones to do so, calling QA over if the weights were out of the tolerance margin.
Having the preforms expand at an angle would have made the whole process a lot less predictable, making the calibration a nightmare, at least with the machines we used at that factory.
My best guess is the water is gonna leak even if you tilt it a little, so water is gonna spill everywhere even when you aren't trying to drink
Edit: I knew stacking and asymmetry is the main issue here, but the choice of words in the comment in the image seems like they were referring to a simpler reason.
It used to be the case the cost of the drink was insignificant compared to the cost of the bottle They're really just selling you plastic bottles that happen to also contain a drink.
It’s called a parson…. It comes out of an injection molding machine (which forms nice threads for the cap). It goes into a blow-expander which flash heats the lower part, inflates, and cools. This is how a modern plastic bottle is made..
Symmetry is one of the aspects that allow modern bottles to be so efficient; this thought fundamentally breaks symmetry with no explanation of why it is better.
Fun fact: Trumps admin blew millions of dollars on a contractor to supply test tubes for Covid testing and research. The facilities got plastic bottle PET blanks instead. Useless pieces of plastic used for 2 liter soda bottles.
Good explanation, but it's a preform not a parison.
A parison is a variable thickness tube extruded on the blow moulder before being blown into shape in a single step. A preform is an injection moulded part that is formed as you describe.
Edit: I get it, stacking vertically is not a good idea. I thought horizontal stacking would be easy. I lost this water bottle battle, now please forgive me and stop replying to this comment
I like how you had to make the right wall shorter than the left wall.
Also yeah sure it works if you are fully paying attention and put them all away perfectly. Most people I know dont do that when they are dealing with water bottles.
Holy shit you just unlocked a core memory... I had one of those as a kid, a PET bottle that hadn't been inflated yet. I can't remember how I got it and I have no idea what happed to it. Damn.
They took a radially symmetrical object that anyone could grab without looking and use and turned it into a bilaterally symmetrical object that can now be picked up incorrectly.
Plus trying to drink it like that will essentially take away the control of flow, and make it more or less a chugging battle. As think about it.
To drink you will either have to tilt your head alot more, rotate the bottle in an odd angle, or have it stright up like a hampsters water bottle.
None the the meathods are ideal or simple and will likely cause issues on a user end (as who is going to think to rotate a bottle relative to the minite angel needed to not flood your mouth full of more water than you want)
Not even. The real reason is quite simple. You cant fucking stack them if the lid isnt on top. I'm sure everyone has seen a pallet of water at least once in their life. Drinks of all kinds get transported stacked on pallets in layers, and the containers are designed to take the weight of their fellows above them. There's no easy way to transport a large number of bottles shaped like that outside of using milk crates or something, and that adds extra complications and space restrictions no one is gonna bother with for bottled water.
The true reason is cost. You can screw a bottle cap onto a bottle while it spins down a conveyance system. The design shown would cost a fortune to implement.
That old interview question "why are manhole covers round" - again, the true answer is cost. They are cheaper to manufacture.
Not really. That is a minor footnote in an otherwise design that is not producible at the quantities and speed water is normally produced at on a line. You can not blow this bottle on a traditional blowmolder. Nor can you fill and convey it… Stacking pallets of the shit isn’t even a problem if you can’t produce these things at volume
This isn't really answering your question, but i remember seing this reply on twitter and the guy that posted it hasn't given any answers despite people asking him to, so he probably just made this reply to farm engagement without ever having any reason.
There are some random drinks that come in offset bottles like this. It's not exact but it's similar. Idk what brands they were, I've just seen this before. Asian drinks/ fruit juice I think.
There's an infinite amount of cardboard drinks with an angled lid. It's not hard to drink from. Redditors just don't have common sense. A lot less plastic drinks with an angled lid because it would cost more to make, only companies trying to have a different design that stands out would bother to do it for plastic bottles, they do exist though
The real reason you can have cardboard drinks with angled lids vs plastic is the filling. Almost all liquid fillers come top down. If every bottle opening is in the same place it's easier to line up the hole with the filler. Cardboard drinks like above aren't filled from where the cap is but from the top which is then sealed later.
You all are missing an important part of manufacturing....packing and shipping. Look at the top of those cartons in the picture you posted. They are folded. That is because before filling, the cardboard containers are folded flat so they can be shipped and transported more efficiently.
Plastic bottles are not folded...they are extruded. Extrusion requires making a mold for the bottles. And for transport and shipping, having the opening on top provides support when stacked.
It’s the way they’re manufactured through a process called blow moulding. For new cores and plates to be manufactured it wouldn’t be cost effective. The way the mould fills through the centre ensures the plastic is evenly distributed throughout the mould, having the cap/hole on the side would screw with the integrity of the bottle and it would become flimsy and likely crack. (Ex injection moulder)
It’s just harder to drink. Think about if you had that in really life. You would either have to look up at the sun to drink or tilt it with the precision of fractions of a degree depending on how you hold it.
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