Bayer has made a significant step towards eliminating the use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in its consumer health portfolio with the launch of a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) blister pack for its Aleve analgesic brand in the Netherlands.
Claiming it as the “first-of-its-kind in the healthcare industry,” the PET blister – designed in partnership with pharma packaging specialist Liveo Research – reduces the carbon footprint of Aleve packaging by 38%, Bayer says.
In addition to reducing Aleve’s carbon footprint, the PET blister also uses 78% less water and 53% less land – potentially addressing biodiversity loss – and is more easily recyclable as it uses only a single material, eliminating the aluminum foil layer usually found in medicine packaging.
“Our goal is to transform our packaging to deliver remarkable experiences to our consumers while minimizing our environmental impact and ultimately creating circular solutions,” commented Bayer Consumer Health’s vice president and global head of design, packaging, product experience and sustainability Chris Padain.
“With its improved carbon footprint and decreased impact on water use and land, we’re proud of this step forward in our journey towards environmental sustainability.”
“With the introduction of our PET One-Material Blister into Bayer’s Aleve product range, we’ve proven that more sustainable blister packaging is possible on a large, global scale,” he said.
Liveo CEO Carsten Heldmann added that the introduction of the firm’s PET One-Material Blister into Bayer’s Aleve product range proves that “more sustainable blister packaging is possible on a large, global scale.”
“As a specialized pharmaceutical packaging company, we will continue to support this industry to deliver their sustainability targets while complying with the strict regulatory requirements.”
Evolutionary Process
In the coming years, Bayer group has the ambition to replace all its blister packaging with more sustainable alternatives, it says.
However, as Padain told HBW Insight in an exclusive interview, Bayer is looking to do this in “evolutionary,” rather than revolutionary, terms.
Roughly 70% of Bayer Consumer Health’s non-recyclable packaging is accounted for by medicine blister packs, he revealed, which means that any changes that are too “disruptive” would, “from a capital investment point of view, be seismic.”
In the short term, therefore, the firm is looking at alternative plastics, with PET at the top of the list. PET is one of the most used plastics in the world, which means that it has a high value for recyclers, Padain explained.
Choosing more obscure plastics that have low or no value for recyclers would be counter-productive, he noted. “We’re not really solving a problem. We might be moving out of a material of concern, but we’re not ultimately achieving a recyclable solution.”
“From a potential-to-be-recycled point of view, PET seems like a very logical place to start,” he reflected. “And this is where our suppliers are doing an amazing job, in terms of qualifying what materials can run on existing infrastructure and what can’t.”
Revolutionary Options
This is not to say that Bayer isn’t also exploring revolutionary alternatives. The firm is, after all, a member alongside Haleon and Sanofi of PA Consulting’s Blister Pack Collective, which is working on bringing to market a sustainable dry molded fiber (DMF) tablet blister pack developed by packaging firm PulPac.
According to PulPac, its DMF technology offers a sustainable like-for-like, scalable alternative to plastic blister packs. Through a high speed and low-cost production process, water usage and CO₂ emissions are minimized – leaving a 80% lower CO₂ footprint than wet molded alternatives – creating an end product comparable to PVC packs in terms of design and tablet count.
However, revolutionary solutions “clearly carry a higher risk,” Padain said. “I think there’s a duality here. It’s not necessarily that I expect all our packaging to be paper in 10 years’ time. I think there are equal limitations with regards to paper and pulp.”
“I think what we’re doing right now is trying to understand what’s the potential of these technologies. Can they provide solutions, and what parts of the portfolio can they provide solutions for? What are the technical challenges? What are the consumer challenges regarding experience, etc?”
Recycling Challenge
Returning to Bayer’s use of PET in Aleve, the next challenge is making sure that blister packs do actually get recycled. As global recycling giant Veolia told HBW Insight, current recycling systems are “not equipped to handle medical plastics in a closed-loop fashion at scale.”
“This is due to limitations in how these plastics are collected, sorted, and reprocessed, making it impossible to reuse them for similar applications in the medical field, and often packaging in general,” noted circular packaging expert Filipe Vieira de Castro.
“Obviously there’s a job to be done there,” commented Padain. “I think there is a consumer job to be done regarding awareness that this is even an item that can be recycled. I think health authorities are also key to tackling this.”
“But it is also an industry wide challenge, to start to look at what needs to be true for this to happen,” he added.
Industry Collaboration
Here Padain is an advocate for the kind of cross-sector collaboration exemplified by the Blister Pack Collective, and taken forward on a larger and wider scale by organizations like the Global Self-Care Federation.
For example, Bayer is a signatory of GSCF’s “Charter for Environmentally Sustainable Self-Care,” which the latter describes as the world’s “first commitment from the consumer health industry to drive sustainable self-care.”
“Some great discussions have started now with our peers,” Padain enthused. “And I think most companies have a common point of view, that this isn’t really about competitive advantage, but rather, ultimately, about getting our portfolios where they need to be.”
“Working across industry is a great way to start to influence that change, because I think it’s something that we, on our own, are not able to do.”
