Downgauging refers to reducing the amount of material in a product while still maintaining or even improving the properties of that material.

For example, just a gram or two saved in the weight of a package can have a tremendous impact on the environment and energy efficiency when you factor in the net gain of millions of individual packages. Improved plastics offer tremendous downgauging opportunities, especially in packaging. 

Advanced metallocene polyolefins, including the Exceed™ and Enable™ product families manufactured by ExxonMobil Chemical, help consumer products companies to downgauge their packaging while achieving greater packaging strength and durability.

More examples include:

• Approximately 5.6 billion 2-liter plastic soda bottles are sold each year. When these bottles were introduced in the late 1970s, they weighed 68 grams. Improved packaging technologies have decreased the weight of the same type of bottle to 49 grams, eliminating an estimated 200 million pounds of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) each year.
  

• More than 5.8 billion plastic milk containers are sold each year in the United States. An empty one-gallon jug weighed 120 grams in the 1960s. Now it weighs less than 60 grams, resulting in a reduction of roughly 750 million pounds per year in the consumption of high density polyethylene (HDPE).

• Plastic trash bags started appearing in homes and along curbsides around the world by the late 1960s. Since that time, plastic trash bags have been made thinner by 50 percent, thus saving millions of pounds of polyethylene.