PA Consulting and PulPac are calling upon pharma, consumer health and FMCG industries to join the Blister Pack Collective to bring the world’s first Dry Molded Fiber tablet pack to market – minimising the use of plastics for over-the-counter and prescription drugs and vitamins.
Professional services firm PA Consulting is well known for its expertise in the healthcare and design segments. The company has taken on a number of prominent projects in both lines of work recently, including helping Hampshire County Council leverage robotics in its care sector, and coordinating a cluster of manufacturing companies during the pandemic, to produce thousands of new ventilators.
Now, the consultancy has collaborated with Swedish R&D company PulPac to provide pharmaceutical manufacturers with a recyclable and sustainable fibre alternative to traditional non-recyclable PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) blister packs. With 100,000 tonnes of plastic produced globally for medicine packaging every year, the new Blister Pack Collective will use PulPac’s dry moulded fibre technology to provide a scalable solution for pharma and consumer healthcare companies to use.
Philip Fawcus, Sustainable Materials Expert at PA Consulting, commented, “PulPac’s Dry Molded Fiber technology combined with the ingenious PA team has allowed the shapes, functions and features of current plastic blister packs to be translated into cellulose – a huge step for the industry as they seek sustainable packaging options.”
Dry moulded fibre uses renewable pulp and cellulose resources to produce low-cost, high-performance fibre-based packaging. The proprietary manufacturing process uses less CO2 and almost no water to create highly versatile tablet arrays that match the design and tablet count of commodity PVC. Now that PA and PulPac have concluded the proof of concept phase to demonstrate its viability, industry collaboration is now required to accelerate development.
Jamie Stone, Sustainability Design Expert at PA Consulting, added, “It will take innovation and collaboration to tackle the climate crisis, and our partnership with PulPac epitomises this. Using our collective strengths, we have found a solution to tackle one of the huge plastic waste issues across industries reliant on tablet blister packs. We now need industry to join us and help accelerate the development of this ingenious solution and help remove tonnes of problem plastic waste from the planet.”
Looking ahead, PA is calling on any interested organisations to register to support the project, via the firm’s website. Sanna Fager, Chief Commercial Officer at PulPac, explained that any “industry players that seek to be a force for sustainable change in the packaging industry are very welcome to join the collective.”
Fager concluded, “The innovative tablet blister packs designed by the PA team demonstrate a viable fiber-based concept of a circular solution in cellulose that can solve a global challenge. Leveraging the benefits of our Dry Molded Fiber technology – instead of single-use PVC – these packs would be circular in paper-streams and still be functional, scalable, but most importantly affordable.”