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

When Owens-Illinois abandoned commercialization of the new and successful plastic 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 to self-manufacture its own PET plastic containers. Over its 35-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 source for training, manufacturing support, recycling technologies and laboratory testing. PTI is known for developing and commercializing sustainable plastic packaging products and strategies. Over its 35-year history, PTI has spawned 5 subsidiary recycling, manufacturing, and technology development companies, including Phoenix Technologies International, PTI-Europe, Preform Technologies, The Packaging Conference, and Guardian Medical USA, and PTI is planning for an exciting future by partnering with other leading industry recycling, manufacturing, and medical companies, here in the US and in Europe.

“The History of the PET Bottle” fulfills Tom’s long-time desire to capture the history of the PET container industry, including many important stories which have been contributed by former PET industry colleagues. Thanks to all of those colleagues!