In healthcare, packaging is an integral part of the delivery of medicines and medical devices providing essential functions that help protect the product, ensure sterility, support usability and increase longevity.

As the global leader in packaging, we have developed a design philosophy to guide the development of the next generation of safe, high-performance, more sustainable healthcare packaging.

Five key packaging priorities:

1. Maintaining the stability, integrity and effectiveness of active molecules

The primary purpose of pharmaceutical packaging is to protect medicines from contamination and maintain their effectiveness until delivery to the point of care. Maintaining a barrier against gas and moisture that can alter the properties of the product, protecting against contamination and physical damage and keeping the stability of active ingredients are key for this type of application.

2. Preserving functionality of pharmaceutical and medical packaging

Packaging plays an important role in patient care. Whether medicines or devices are used in the home, hospital, or surgical theatre, users interact with healthcare products by opening, peeling, and pushing through packaging. Packaging therefore needs to be designed to ensure convenience and compliance, while remaining safe to keep in a home environment. Our R&D team is committed to the user experience by improving peel-performance, preserving child-resistance and maintaining senior-friendly properties.

3. Safety in transit: ensuring integrity and sterility across the supply chain

In particular during a time of great flux and instability, as supply chains have been dramatically impacted over the past two years, preservation of pharmaceutical products or medical devices during transit is a key requirement of healthcare packaging to protect the end-user safety. Healthcare packaging should offer a high level of safety, even when on the move.

4. Embracing sustainability without impacting safety

Healthcare industries need to continually evolve the quality and composition of their packaging. However, this now needs to be done in alignment with sustainability commitments, both to follow consumers demands as well as to fit within changing sustainability guidelines. This means companies need to strike a balance when it comes to product packaging, one that embraces sustainability while always maintaining product safety. Amcor is constantly searching for innovative solutions to sustainable packaging design.

5. Reinventing packaging and bringing innovation from other areas

The packaging sector is currently in a period of rapid experimentation and innovation. Advances in material science have enabled R&D teams to push the boundaries of what’s possible in packaging, shifting away from long-established packaging norms towards new materials with different compositions and features. Leveraging this experimentation allows the healthcare sector to optimise for greater levels of sustainability.

Amcor’s commitment to sustainability

In January 2018, Amcor pledged to develop all our packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2025. To this end, we are working continuously with healthcare companies to enact real and lasting change. We also work across the industry with suppliers, customers, supply chain operatives and recyclers to leverage the sustainability knowledge already available. Evidence of this commitment is displayed in our membership of the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council which is focusing on healthcare challenges and in our newly announced SBTi targets, among other Amcor’s wide-ranging sustainability strategies.

Amcor has also committed significant resources to pushing the boundaries of product innovation and exploring the uses of alternative materials that have a lower environmental impact than current solutions and reducing the reliance on plastics. For many applications we already have more sustainable solutions with our existing multilayers technology for medical films that can be adapted to utilize recyclable material. In parallel with recyclability improvement, we are also making progress on carbon footprint reduction.

Dessiflex®, an aluminium based blister or sachets foil which has been on the market for 10 years, features a desiccant component included in the laminate to help reduce pack weight and carbon footprint by eliminating the need for a desiccant sachet. We have also created completely new solutions such as our recyclable ready PVC-free, polyethylene blister solution AmSky that can run on exiting packing lines.

Our sachets and stickpacks paper solutions for pharmaceutical products are recycle-ready and limit the use of aluminium, plastic and PVC materials. For healthcare packaging solutions we can also develop recyclable packaging targeting the paper stream.

To continue supporting the healthcare sector, we need to make sure we leverage the experience we have gained in material science to help inform the way we design packaging moving forward.

Finally, we always need to think one step ahead, ensuring that when we innovate, we do so with purpose to help push the industry forward and provide higher quality products.

For more information on packaging priorities, our VP of R&D Noemi Bertolino recently outlined these issues in a recent podcast which you can listen to here, and there is further information on Amcor’s solutions for healthcare packaging on our website.