How to measure sustainability of pharmaceutical packaging

by Dr. Manfred Zurkirch, Dividella AG, Switzerland

The term sustainability has been around for many decades and has some times been interpreted in most unconventional ways to suit the user’s purposes. Many politicians are advocating to measure and based on those numbers to limit emissions like CO2. While this is certainly an important aspect of sustainability it only covers a very small fraction of the whole story as we shall see further on. For quite a number of corporations it has become one of the top priorities to have a “green” touch because they found out that it can help their image and, interestingly enough, their bottom line.

From a purely linguistic point of view sustainable means to endure or to carry the weight of some thing for a long time. In ecology it describes how biological systems remain diverse over time. In human history, sustainability is the potential for long-term maintenance of well-being. This can have social, economic and ecological dimension. In this article we want to focus on ecological sustainability.

The most famous definition was probably made by the Brundtland Commission in 1989. "Sustainability means to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability for future generations to meet their own needs."

In a first step we will investigate how sustainability can be measured. This is a prerequisite to rank different products according to their environmental burden. Secondly, we will apply that framework to pharmaceutical packaging and compare different solutions regarding their environmental footprint. Lastly, we will have a closer look at the positive financial implications of being ecologically sustainable in a pharmaceutical packaging production.

Life Cycle Assessment

One way to measure sustainability is the well known Ecological Footprint concept. It compares human demand with planet Earth's capacity to regenerate. It is estimated that mankind currently uses ecological services at a factor of roughly 1.4 of what Earth can sustainably renew. Obviously, concepts like the ecological footprint are interesting but do not help to assess the environmental burden caused by a single product over its whole life. It is necessary to go one step further and use the so-called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or Ecobalance method.

Clearly, it is beyond the scope of this article to explain the LCA concept in detail. Therefore, we will just briefly outline the most prominent corner stones of the idea before going through a real example. LCA models the complex interaction between a given product and its environment from the cradle to the grave as depicted schematically in figure 1. In general, LCA consists of two major steps:

Step 1 - Inventory:  Describes which emissions occur and which raw materials are used during the life of a product. To make the comparison as objective and scientific as possible we used commercially available software.[i] This software incorporates many databases for all kind of materials (metals, plastics, cardboards,...) and processes (injection moulding, extrusion,...). These databases provide all the emissions that occur when, for example, four grams of virgin fibre cardboard are produced.

Step 2 - Assessment: Lists the impacts of these emissions and raw material depletions.

This step is made using the widely accepted EcoIndicator99 method[ii], which measures the damages that all the emissions calculated in the inventory step have on our ecosystems. At the end, individual categories like CO₂ emissions or one single score for the overall environmental footprint can be compared.

Case Study - NeoTOP packaging style vs. plastic tray for a six count syringe presentation

In a first case study we investigate the environmental burden caused by two different packages which have the exact same purpose over their life time - to deliver six syringes to a hospital. The two packaging solutions are shown in figure 2. The NeoTOP solution is made of two pieces of flat cardboard that are automatically erected on the Dividella packaging machine. The alternative, more traditional package is made of a cardboard box and a plastic tray. The plastic tray is typically deep drawn on a thermoforming machine and then inserted into the cardboard box on cartoning equipment. For illustrational purposes we have looked at trays made of PVC and PP to get an understanding about the differences between various kinds of plastic. The tray made of aluminum is just a theoretical example in this case but it can easily be applied to tablets which some times go into aluminium blisters.

The underlying scenario did include the following aspects:

• Manufacture of raw materials like PVC, PP, PET, cardboard fibres
• Processes like making cardboard and plastic foil
• Energy consumption of secondary packaging machines per pack
• Transport of cardboard and plastic from 60 miles to the pharmaceutical plant
• End of life (landfill scenario)

The scenario did not include:

• LCA of syringes and patient info because they are identical for both solutions
• Transport from pharmaceutical plant to final customer. We will address this separately in the financial impact section.

The two life cycles were modelled in the SimaPro software and evaluated according to the steps that have been discussed above. Figure 3 outlines the inventory step showing the relative importance of each pack style regarding various environmental categories like "respiratory organics" or "climate change". The latter contains, for instance, emissions like carbon dioxide or methane. The investigation could stop here and we could highlight specific key performance indicators like carbon dioxide. We learn from the database that the carbon footprint of the NeoTOP solution over its whole life cycle is about 18 grams of Carbon dioxide whereas the plastic solutions are all around 80 grams and aluminium tops the scale with 155 grams. In short, even if we assume an error bar of about 20% in the modelling, Toploading is a factor of 4-5 better concerning the environmental indicator carbon dioxide.

As a next step we are interested to see how the different solutions fare from an overall impact perspective. In figure 4 all the category emissions are weighed against each other and added to one grand total per packaging solution. The total of the environmental impact is measured in EcoIndicator Points according to the EcoIndicator method used.

It is obvious that the NeoTOP solution causes the smallest environmental damage by far. All other packaging solutions cause a burden about five times bigger than the NeoTOP solution. Clearly, there are many emissions into the air, soil and water included in this overall result. Carbon dioxide is only a small, yet important, contributor to the whole story.

Case Study - NeoTOP packaging style vs. plastic tray for a six count ampoule presentation

In order to verify the stability of the model and the assessment method, a second example as depicted in figure 5 is evaluated in the following paragraphs.

Again the life cycles of two different pack styles are modelled and analyzed with the same software and underlying databases. To make a long story short only the consolidated final numbers are shown in figure 6. In this case the environmental footprint of the plastic/cardboard combination solution was even about 9 times worse than that of the NeoTOP package. The situation was further aggravated for the plastic solution because the NeoTOP package could be designed smaller by packaging the ampoules more densely.

As a general finding, based on many more case studies, one can infer the following. If Dividella NeoTOP packaging solutions are compared with combination packs (blister or tray in a cardboard box), the environmental footprint of the NeoTOP box is generally 4-5 times smaller. Oftentimes, it is feasible to optimize the volume of the NeoTOP package much more than that of the plastic tray. In such cases the factor is even between 8-12 times smaller.

Financial impact of sustainable solutions

It might come as no surprise that, as a rule of thumb, more sustainable packaging also saves pharmaceutical companies money.

On one hand, there is the cost for the packaging material. The less material is used, which means, for instance, optimized volume, the cheaper the solution is. It is clear that volume optimization is not the only parameter in pharmaceutical packaging development. Evidently, there is always the challenge of addressing different interest for every package - some of which go against each other as pointed out in figure 7.

However, Dividella has proven on many occasions that cost savings for the packaging materials between 10-40% can be achieved going from combination packs to NeoTOP cardboard only solutions. 10%-20% is possible if the volume of both solutions is similar, 40-50% if the volume can be optimized. Depending on the number of packages produced in a year these recurring cost savings can be substantial.

Clearly, the smaller volume of the densely packed NeoTOP solution (thanks to the cardboard partitions without glass to glass contact) also has a huge impact on transportation costs of cold chain products.

As an example, we calculated the annual savings for a 4 count syringe pack (NeoTOP versus plastic tray in a side loading box), which is currently on the market.

If one assumes volumes of 2.5 Mio. packs per year and an average distance of 1600 miles travelled by boat, these are savings of roughly one million US$ per year.

If volumes of 2.5 Mio. packs per year and an average distance of 1600 miles travelled by air are taken as a basis, these are savings of 10 million US$ roughly.

It goes without saying that the exact savings depend on the logistics like type of carrier, distribution channel and network as well as number of packages. However, the examples above clearly show that material and transportation costs can be substantially lower for solutions that are also ecologically viable. In pharmaceutical secondary packaging we have never observed a case where ecological and economic go against each other.

Summary

This article has presented a method to measure the environmental impact of different products or services in an analytical way. The LCA method enables the customer to rank packaging solutions and to choose those that help him to reduce his ecological footprint. In general, this environmental ranking goes hand in hand with the economic ranking. In other words, sustainable packaging solutions also save substantial money and can help improve the bottom line of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

[i] SimaPro by PréConusultants (www.pre.nl)

[ii] EcoIndicator 99 impact assessment method - report available under www.pre.nl

Figures:

Fig. 1: Schematic of a product life cycle (www.wikipedia.com)

Fig 2: Six count syringe package either in a plastic tray/cardboard box combination (top) or a NeoTOP all cardboard presentation (bottom)

Fig. 3: Comparison of various packaging and material solutions in a wide selection of environmental categories after step 1 of the LCA

Fig. 4: Comparison of the total environmental burden caused by the two packaging solutions and different materials measured in EcoIndicator 99 points

Fig. 5: Six count ampoule package either in a plastic tray/cardboard box combination (top) or a NeoTOP all cardboard presentation with optimized volume (bottom)

Fig. 6: Comparison of the total environmental burden caused by the two packaging solutions and different materials measured in EcoIndicator 99 points.

Fig. 7: Packaging development engineers always have to reconcile various interests to find the optimal solution for the whole value chain

About

Dr. Manfred Zurkirch is Managing Director of Dividella AG, which he joined in 2006 from a leading Swiss technology group, where he was Business Unit Manager, and previously VP of Marketing and Sales. His expertise covers the capital equipment industry, and through his extensive sales activities he has an excellent knowledge of international markets.