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Industry Primers

Bottom-up NAICS industry primers written for both public-market and private investors. Leaf industries are researched from the ground up; every group, subsector, and sector above them reads as a contrast across the industries beneath it.

2122 industries · 24 sectors · NAICS 2022

Researched with AI assistance from official U.S. statistics and independent sources, with citations on every page. Figures are not individually verified against pinned evidence — primers marked Evidence-verified are. Industry research, not investment advice. Methodology.

IndustryNAICS 32616

Plastics Bottle Manufacturing in the United States (NAICS 32616)

A rollup primer. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 32616 is a five-digit "industry" that, in this case, contains exactly one six-digit national industry — 326160, Plastics Bottle Manufacturing. Because the two are effectively identical, this page is a short overview. For full detail — the investable universe, contract economics, regulation, and risks — see the 326160 primer.

1. Overview

Plastics bottle manufacturing is the business of turning plastic resin into the billions of bottles, jugs, and preforms ("preform" = the test-tube-shaped blank later blown into a bottle) that hold what Americans drink, eat, wash with, and pour into their cars. It is a high-volume, capital-intensive, thin-margin conversion business: a plant buys resin by the truckload, melts and molds it into containers, and sells them to beverage, food, personal-care, household-chemical, and pharmaceutical companies.[1][3]

For an investor, this is a mature, defensive, cash-generative slice of the packaging economy, geared to consumer-staples volumes rather than to fashion or the tech cycle. It is not a growth story, but it throws off steady cash behind sticky multi-year customer contracts, and it is in the middle of a consolidation-and-sustainability shakeup that is reshaping who wins.

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

At the five-digit level, NAICS 32616 rolls up a single six-digit national industry:

Child (6-digit) Name Share of this level
326160 Plastics Bottle Manufacturing 100%

There is no second child to average against, so the five-digit "industry" (32616) and the six-digit "national industry" (326160) describe the same set of plants and the same dollars. NAICS simply carries the code down one more digit for international comparability. Every figure below is therefore identical to the child's, and every question of structure — merchant vs. captive production, PET (polyethylene terephthalate) beverage bottles vs. HDPE (high-density polyethylene) jugs, injection and blow molding — is answered in full in the 326160 primer.

3. How big it is (this level's rollup figures)

Federal statistics for NAICS 32616 (the ground truth here; these are our ingested figures):

Metric Value Source year
Value of shipments (receipts) $17.1 billion 2022 Economic Census[2]
Establishments (plants) 474 2023 County Business Patterns (CBP)[1]
Paid employees 37,673 2023 CBP[1]
Annual payroll $2.31 billion 2023 CBP[1]
First-quarter payroll $578 million 2023 CBP[1]
Firms ~200 2022 Economic Census[2]
Average pay per employee (payroll ÷ employees) ~$61,000 computed from 2023 CBP[1]
SBA small-business size standard 1,250 employees 2023[4]

The industry ships roughly $17 billion of bottles a year across about 474 plants — on the order of $36 million of output per plant, reflecting how capital-intensive and automated the work is.[1][2] The SBA's unusually high 1,250-employee threshold for "small" signals a business where even sizeable operators are treated as small, and where the few genuinely large players stand apart.[4] Because 32616 has one child, these are exactly the 326160 numbers; nothing is added or blended at the rollup.

Undercount caveat (important here). These federal figures materially undercount total U.S. plastic-bottle output because so much bottle-making is captive — done in-house by the beverage and consumer-goods companies that fill the bottles. When a water or soda company molds bottles inline at its filling plant, the Census usually classifies that establishment under the beverage codes (for example, 312112 Bottled Water), not under 326160. Niagara Bottling alone makes roughly two billion bottles a year in-house, none of it counted here.[5][6] Treat the $17 billion as the merchant (sell-to-others) market, not the whole industry.

4. Investable universe — where the value sits

Because this level is one child, value concentrates exactly where it does for 326160: there is no pure-play public U.S. plastic-bottle stock. The largest merchant bottle makers are privately held (Plastipak, with 40-plus sites and 6,500-plus employees; Graham Packaging) or are subsidiaries of holding companies (Altium Packaging under Loews, with roughly 4,000 employees at year-end 2025; Berry Global, now inside Amcor).[7][8][9][10][11][12] Listed exposure comes through diversified packaging companies — Amcor (NYSE: AMCR), Silgan Holdings (NYSE: SLGN), AptarGroup (NYSE: ATR) — or a holding company, Loews (NYSE: L); a downstream, self-manufacturing proxy is Primo Brands (NYSE: PRMB). Direct, concentrated exposure lives in private hands — family owners, private equity, and sovereign/infrastructure capital such as Singapore's GIC. Full company-by-company detail is in Section 4 of the 326160 primer.

5. How the money works

Owners earn the conversion spread — the gap between the price of a finished bottle and the cost of the resin, energy, labor, and freight that go into it — multiplied by enormous unit volumes. Three economics dominate, all the same at this level as at the child:

  • Resin is the whole ballgame. Plastic resin is roughly 50–70%+ of a bottle's cost, so contracts index selling prices to published resin benchmarks with a lag; the number to watch is the conversion margin per pound, not the resin price itself.[13]

  • Volume and utilization. Molding lines are expensive fixed assets that must run near capacity; profit improves with throughput, uptime, and "lightweighting" (shaving grams of resin per bottle).

  • Freight defines geography. Empty bottles are mostly air, so producers locate next to — or inside — the customer's filling plant, or ship compact preforms to blow on-site. Graham says one of every three of its plants is near or inside a customer filling facility; Amcor disclosed an on-site operation producing approximately 50 million PET bottles annually for Campbell Soup after a $7 million installation, expected to eliminate more than 2,000 truckloads annually.[14][15] Proximity is a genuine moat.

Industry sources put gross margins in the ~25–35% range, with thin net margins and returns that hinge on asset utilization.[13] Segment-level EBIT margins at public comparables run roughly 10–13% (Amcor rigid 10.6% for the nine months ended March 2026, Silgan Custom Containers 12.7%), though neither is a pure NAICS 326160 measure.[16][17]

6. What drives demand

  • Beverage volumes, led by bottled water — the largest single end use and biggest swing factor; U.S. per-capita bottled-water consumption is near 47 gallons a year, and PET dominates the format.[18][19] However, the International Bottled Water Association, citing preliminary 2025 data, reported that single-serve PET volume grew only 0.2% even as headline water consumption rose 2.5% — headline water growth should not be applied mechanically to single-serve bottle demand.[20]

  • Food, household, and personal care — HDPE jugs and bottles for milk, condiments, detergents, shampoos, plus pharma and automotive-fluid bottles.

  • Dairy is a countertrend. USDA reports that U.S. fluid-milk sales declined from 55.4 billion pounds in 2009 to 43.2 billion pounds in 2024, a 22% reduction.[21] Milk-bottle suppliers can still gain through share shifts among formats, but the underlying category has been shrinking.

  • Private-label growth and convenience/single-serve habits support unit demand.[5]

  • Counter-drivers: sustainability backlash, refill/return schemes, aluminum and glass substitution, and single-use-plastic restrictions cap volume growth.

7. Regulation

The regulatory story is the industry's central strategic variable and runs mostly at the state level. Key pieces (detailed in the 326160 primer): Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws that shift recycling costs onto producers (California's SB 54 is the flagship, with regulations taking effect May 1, 2026)[22][23]; recycled-content mandates requiring post-consumer recycled PET, or rPET (California's AB 793 requires 25% as of January 1, 2025, rising to 50% by January 1, 2030, with a penalty of about $0.20 per pound on the shortfall)[24]; container-deposit "bottle bill" laws in ten states that collect a disproportionate share of PET (over 60% of PET beverage containers recycled in the U.S.)[25]; U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearances for food-grade recycled resin, evaluated case by case with concerns about residual contaminants and noncompliant additives[26]; and 2025 tariffs on chemical feedstocks that raised resin costs.[27]

8. Consolidation

The industry is moderately concentrated and consolidating. Federal concentration data (identical at this level, since it is one child) show the top 4 firms at 47.4% of shipments, top 8 at 62.3%, top 20 at 82.7%, and top 50 at 93.7%, with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) of about 700 — technically "unconcentrated" by antitrust standards (below 1,500), but with a clear large-player tier above a long tail of small custom molders.[2] The 2025 Amcor–Berry Global combination (~$10.4 billion plus assumed debt) created a ~$23-billion global packaging leader and pulled a top U.S. rigid-plastics maker inside a listed parent.[7][8] A parallel force is captive insourcing — large customers pulling bottle-making in-house — which structurally caps the merchant market's growth.[5][6]

9. Risks

  • Resin and tariff volatility — with resin at 50–70%+ of cost, sharp moves compress margins during the pass-through lag; non-integrated converters are most exposed.[13][27]

  • Substitution and sustainability pressure — aluminum, glass, refill/return models, and pouches threaten PET; brand pledges and bans add momentum.[28]

  • Customer insourcing — captive manufacturing can shrink the addressable merchant market with little warning.[5]

  • Recycled-content squeeze — mandates require rPET that is scarce and dear, even as U.S. recycling economics are under stress; NAPCOR's revised 2023 data show a U.S. PET-bottle collection rate of 32.5% and average recycled PET content in U.S. bottles of just 16.1%.[29][30]

  • Mature demand — volume growth is low-single-digit at best and industry revenue has drifted down since 2020.[3]

  • Operational hazards — high-temperature, high-pressure blow-molding operations carry severe risks from inadequate machine guarding, including amputations, burns, and fatalities.[31]

10. How to invest and the outlook

With no pure-play, the practical listed exposures are Amcor (AMCR) for diversified rigid-and- flexible packaging including bottles, preforms, and closures via Berry; Silgan (SLGN) for dispensing/closures and custom plastic containers; AptarGroup (ATR) for the dispensing systems that ride on bottles; Loews (L) for indirect, diluted exposure to Altium Packaging; and Primo Brands (PRMB) as a downstream, self-manufacturing water company. These trade as mature, dividend-paying industrials — valuation and yield, not hypergrowth, are the frame. Direct, concentrated exposure is a private-markets game: family and private-equity control of the biggest converters, plus sovereign/infrastructure capital. The likely path is flat-to-modest volume growth with margins defended through lightweighting and contractual pass-through, and value migrating to the players who own recycling assets and low-cost, close-to-the-customer footprints. It is a cash-flow and consolidation story, not a growth one.

For the full treatment — company profiles, contract mechanics, the complete regulatory map, and the detailed risk and outlook discussion — see the 326160 primer.

Sources

Drawn from the child (326160) primer; figures in Section 3 are our ingested federal stats for NAICS 32616, which are identical to 326160.

  1. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023, NAICS 326160 — Plastics Bottle Manufacturing (establishments, employment, annual payroll, first-quarter payroll). 2023. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
  2. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census — Concentration & receipts, NAICS 326160 (value of shipments, firm count, concentration ratios, HHI). 2022. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
  3. IBISWorld. Plastic Bottle Manufacturing in the US — Industry Analysis (mature industry; revenue drift since 2020). 2026. https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/plastic-bottle-manufacturing/519/
  4. U.S. Small Business Administration. Table of Size Standards (NAICS 326160 = 1,250 employees). 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
  5. Wikipedia. Niagara Bottling (captive self-manufacture; ~2 billion bottles/year; private-label leader). 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Bottling
  6. PR Newswire. Primo Brands Corporation Announces Successful Completion of Merger of Primo Water and BlueTriton Brands (vertically integrated, self-manufacturing water company). 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/primo-brands-corporation-announces-successful-completion-of-merger-of-primo-water-and-bluetriton-brands-302300326.html
  7. Amcor. Amcor completes combination with Berry Global. 2025. https://www.amcor.com/media/news/amcor-completes-combination-with-berry-global
  8. PR Newswire. Amcor closes Berry Global merger, reports third quarter result and updates fiscal 2025 outlook (~$23B combined; ~$10.4B plus assumed debt). 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amcor-closes-berry-global-merger-reports-third-quarter-result-and-updates-fiscal-2025-outlook-302443284.html
  9. PR Newswire. Loews Corporation Adds GIC as Partner in its Packaging Subsidiary (GIC buys 47% of Altium; Loews retains ~53%). 2021. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/loews-corporation-adds-gic-as-partner-in-its-packaging-subsidiary-301246421.html
  10. Loews Corporation. 2025 Form 10-K (Altium Packaging ~4,000 employees at year-end 2025). 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/60086/000006008626000008/l-20251231.htm
  11. Plastipak. Careers page (40+ sites, 6,500+ employees across U.S., South America, Europe). 2026. https://www.plastipak.com/careers-in-packaging-and-manufacturing-at-plastipak/
  12. MatrixBCG. Who Owns Plastipak Holdings Company? (Young family control; GS Capital Partners minority). 2026. https://matrixbcg.com/blogs/owners/plastipak
  13. IMARC Group. PET Bottle Manufacturing Plant Project Report (resin ~50–70%+ of cost; gross margins ~25–35%). 2026. https://www.imarcgroup.com/pet-bottle-manufacturing-plant-project-report
  14. Graham Packaging. About Us (one in three plants near or inside customer filling facility). 2026. https://www.grahampackaging.com/about-us/
  15. Amcor. New on-site bottle manufacturing drives efficiency and sustainability at Campbell's plant (~50M PET bottles annually; $7M installation; 2,000+ truckloads eliminated). 2024. https://www.amcor.com/media/news/b/amcors-new-on-site-bottle-manufacturing-drives-efficiency-and-sustainability-at-campbells-plant
  16. Amcor. Q3 FY2026 results — Exhibit 99.1 (rigid segment 10.6% adjusted EBIT margin, nine months ended March 2026). 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1748790/000174879026000014/exhibit991q32026.htm
  17. Silgan Holdings Inc. 2025 Form 10-K (Custom Containers segment $637.6M sales, ~12.7% EBIT margin). 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/849869/000162828026012202/slgn-20251231.htm
  18. Grand View Research. U.S. Bottled Water Packaging Market Size Report (~47 gallons per capita; PET ~80% of format). 2025. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-bottled-water-packaging-market-report
  19. Statista. Bottled water market in the United States (largest beverage category by volume). 2025. https://www.statista.com/topics/1302/bottled-water-market/
  20. International Bottled Water Association. 2025 Progress Report (16.8B gallons U.S. consumption; single-serve PET +0.2%). 2026. https://bottledwater.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025-Progress-Report_FINAL.pdf
  21. USDA Economic Research Service. Fluid milk sales (55.4B lbs in 2009 to 43.2B lbs in 2024; 22% decline). 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/113979
  22. CalRecycle. SB 54 — Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act. 2025. https://calrecycle.ca.gov/packaging/packaging-epr/
  23. CalRecycle. SB 54 regulations effective May 1, 2026 — press release. 2026. https://calrecycle.ca.gov/2026/05/01/press-release-26-05/
  24. CalRecycle. AB 793 — Postconsumer recycled plastic minimum content standards for beverage containers (25% in 2025, 50% by 2030; $0.20/lb penalty). 2025. https://calrecycle.ca.gov/bevcontainer/bevdistman/plasticcontent/
  25. Packaging School. Deposit Return Schemes (DRS) in the United States (10 deposit states; >60% of recycled PET; 67–90% return rates). 2025. https://packagingschool.com/DRS-in-the-US
  26. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Recycled Plastics in Food Packaging (contaminant concerns; case-by-case evaluation). 2025. https://www.fda.gov/food/packaging-food-contact-substances-fcs/recycled-plastics-food-packaging
  27. Plastics News. PET prices climb (2025 resin increases and tariff-driven spot spikes). 2025. https://www.plasticsnews.com/resin-prices/pn-pet-4-26/
  28. LT Plastics. 355 mL Beverage Container Market 2026: PET vs Aluminum vs HDPE (aluminum share; PET substitution dynamics). 2026. https://ltplastics.us/resources/355ml-beverage-container-market-2026-pet-aluminum-hdpe
  29. NAPCOR. 2023 PET Bottle Recycling — revised data (32.5% collection rate; 16.1% recycled content in U.S. bottles). 2024. https://napcor.com/news/2023-pet-bottle-recycling-reach-new-heights/
  30. PlasticsToday / Towards Packaging. Recycled resin markets and rPET bottle market (imported rPET up 65% 2022–2024; U.S. recycling plant closures 2025–26). 2026. https://www.towardspackaging.com/insights/recycled-pet-bottles-market-sizing
  31. OSHA. Plastics Machinery — Machine Guarding eTool (severe risks: amputations, burns, fatalities). 2025. https://www.osha.gov/etools/machine-guarding/plastics-machinery