Upcycled Pharma Packaging: Coming Soon – Then Coming Fast

The emergence of pharma-grade recycled plastics in primary packaging will bring a sustainability sea change.

Melissa Green - Head of Global Marketing, TekniPlex Healthcare.

“Gradually, then all at once.”

In one form or another, this quote has been attributed to various people in differing contexts. Some used it to describe falling in love; others, falling asleep. In his masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway employed it to describe going bankrupt.

Slowly – and sooner or later, suddenly – another issue will showcase the wisdom of these words: recycled content in primary pharmaceutical packaging.

For decades, a blend of sound reasoning and longstanding precedent has kept post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastics out of the primary pharma packaging stream, including in the blisters and bottles housing prescription and over-the-counter oral solid dose (OSD) products. Indeed, Pharmacopeia language prohibits the use of scrap material and insists that any recycled materials incorporated into packaging solutions be properly validated.

This has severely discouraged PCR content’s utilization for primary pharmaceutical packaging. The rationale is clear and justifiably uncompromising: for patient safety’s sake, there can be no risk of contamination entering the supply chain, and current mechanical recycling processes cannot guarantee this.

This precedent exemplifies the historic cautiousness of the pharma industry, one in which being a sustainability pioneer could backfire. Notably, detrimental consequences of incorporating PCR content into primary packaging wouldn’t even require in-field failure; the mere perception of a package providing less product protection or containing possible contaminants could significantly impact its acceptance and, through it, a company’s bottom line. Simply put, pharma players are hesitant to stick their necks out for fear of exposing their heads.

Increasingly, though, technology is moving the needle on pharma’s entrenched risk-reward assessment concerning PCR. Flying fast into these headwinds is the advancement and proliferation of next-level forms of chemical plastics recycling – ones that significantly reduce the risk of materials contamination versus mechanical recycling processes, and ultimately produce upcycled, virgin-quality resins that meet pharma’s unparalleled purity standards.

We’re at the dawn of a new era in pharma packaging sustainability, one when recycled plastics and patient safety are companions rather than competitors. And once this new pairing becomes the new norm, the benefits – most notably consumer demand for more sustainable solutions – are likely to open the floodgates. Upcycled plastics in pharma packaging are the wave of the future, and high tide may be here quicker than we think.

Reaching Up: PCR Progress

Like any nascent enterprise, incorporating PCR plastics into primary pharma packaging means developing concise, coherent best practices. And while materials science can be exceedingly complex and situation-dependent, certain guidelines are already taking shape.

One crucial issue concerns the fact that, from a recyclability standpoint, not all plastic resins are created equal – and these discrepancies require differing recycling methods. Let’s look at three common substrates utilized in OSD pharma packaging: Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE), and polypropylene (PP).

As mentioned, conventional mechanical recycling cannot produce pharma-grade plastics – at least not yet. However, PET has proven highly conducive to what could be considered the next level of recycling complexity: chemical recycling. Sometimes referred to as advanced recycling, chemical recycling breaks plastics down into their original building blocks, a process known as depolymerization. The result is a recycled resin essentially identical in its chemical makeup to virgin, fossil fuel-derived resins.

PE and PP are a bit more finicky. Both require a more rigorous decomposition process, resulting in a substance called feedstock – a general term given to raw materials used for processing or manufacturing another product. On the downside, this extent of recycling granularity is more laborious and expensive than depolymerization recycling (which, in turn, is more labor-intensive and costly than traditional mechanical recycling). The upside is feedstock recycling allows polyolefin polymers (PP and PE) to be recycled in a way that makes them viable for pharma-grade applications in a way mechanical recycling methods could not.

It is this combination of cost and effectiveness that is dictating the current PCR landscape, not just in pharma but in all packaging-relevant sectors. For example, while producing a fully chemically recycled PET package may be prohibitively pricey, a controlled blending of virgin plastics and chemically recycled PET could produce a package that is, say, 30% PCR – a figure that aligns with near-term goals for non-pharma packaging in the European Union, whose recycling stream is more advanced than North America’s.

A similar process, called mass balance, can be conducted to incorporate percentages of PE and PP into plastic packaging that originates from recycled feedstock. With the mass balance approach, the recycled feedstock is intermittently dispersed in the entire output, but the recycled resin can be purchased via 100% recycled content certificates. Again, this mixing of virgin and feedstock recycling is largely a function of cost: the higher the PCR content, the costlier the production process.

But while cost is certainly a deterrent, let’s place a “for now” at the end of that statement. Technologies tend to become more efficient and less expensive as they evolve, and recycling processes aren’t likely to break this rule of thumb. The most important factor here is that these technologies work – so well that it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between chemically recycled resins and their virgin counterparts.

For proof, we need only turn to regulation. It’s become so hard to distinguish chemically recycled from virgin plastics that companies incorporating the former must certify their resins as such. This is undertaken via the International Sustainability & Carbon Certification, also called ISCC Plus, which has essentially become a monitored marketplace for recycled resins and, simultaneously, a means of dissuading dishonest players from labeling virgin plastics as recycled.

The die has been cast: chemically upcycled content in primary pharma packaging is a hurdle that will be gradually eroded and ultimately erased. As sustainability transitions from megatrend to mainstay, an increasing set of enterprising pharma companies will stick their necks out and hands up, willing to be counted among the pioneers that made recycled content in primary pharma packaging the forward-thinking rule rather than the extraordinary exception.

Author Biography

Melissa Green is the Head of Global Marketing for TekniPlex Healthcare, which utilizes advanced materials science expertise and technologies to develop and deliver critical solutions for medical and diagnostic devices, drug delivery systems, and healthcare packaging applications. www.tekni-plex.com/healthcare.

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