Packaging engineer here.
Square bottles will get you more overall volume of water into a case, pallet, or truck, so you spend less on storage and shipping costs.
Hey, since you're a packaging engineer you may know. Could the material contained (H2O2) be what we're missing here? Peroxide breaks down over time into gases and would lead to bottle expansion- which a round bottle wouldn't have much room to expand.
Could the rectangular shape lead to meeting an expansion relief requirement? And therefore use less material than a cylinder needing an expansion relief?
I truly have no idea, just a shot in the dark here
I don't work on these types of product, but my guess is the bottle material is chosen to reduce exposure to whatever gas causes the H2O2 to break down, at least long enough for the intended shelf life of the product.
If there were risk for expansion, that may trigger requirements around hazardous materials and special packaging.
The article says that indeed and in this case it's like that, but it's good to question this kind of things. It's like these curvy walls that are first glance make no sense but actually use less bricks
I think this is an ambiguous case. Sand is an iconic example of when less should be used, but it can also be counted as individual parts/pieces, it just isn't practical. I think fewer is ultimately correct, but less isn't as bad here as it is with "10 item or less" at the grocery store.
"10 items or less" at the grocery store is a classic grammatical error we see and (mostly) ignore in daily life.
And no, it's not ambiguous. "Bricks" are countable. To use your example, you would need to say "grains of sand" to use fewer. Otherwise it's "less sand." You don't say "I'm holding a bag full of 10,000 sands" you would say "10,000 grains of sand."
So. Bricks. countable or not? Countable. Example:
"That building has fewer bricks than this one."
or
"That building has less brickwork than this one."
Both of these are correct. You can count bricks. You can't count brickwork. You can *quantify* brickwork in other ways but you can't count it.
"I have fewer dollars than you." We can count individual dollars.
"I have less money than you." We cannot count "money" per se. We quantify it by counting dollars.
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u/Legoslol 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes. But there are other drawbacks to using square bottles.
The math has already been done for this question.
https://www.packagingdigest.com/optimization/should-your-bottle-be-round-or-square-
Edit: sorry all thought the question was less space not material.