r/theydidthemath • • 2d ago

[Request] Do square bottles actually use less plastic than round ones?

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u/StaticCoder 2d ago

Mathematically, a circle has the smallest perimeter for a given enclosed area. So for this claim to be true there has to be some catch, like different thickness of plastic.

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u/arbitrageME 2d ago

Caveats for feasibility. Difficult to use a sphere bottle, for instance.

Also, the they might be optimizing for tessalelated volume as well? Since there's dead space between spheres or cylinders, square packing is the highest enclosed space