(Photo Credit: Piron Guillaume, Unsplash)Healthcare packaging faces enormous challenges around sustainability, industry experts said at a conference in North Carolina earlier this month. And that was before covid-19 swept through the region.
The issues raised at HealthPack 2020, an annual medical device packaging industry conference that took place March 10 – 12 in Charlotte, aren’t likely to get any easier given the pandemic. However, understanding those sticking points could help manufacturers in the industry who must do much more with much less.
“Sustainability is important. It’s on everybody’s radar. But in our industry, we have a lot of constraints on how to get there,” Ondrea Kassarjian, senior manager of packaging and labeling at the healthcare products and services company Hollister, said at the conference, according to Packaging Digest.
Kassarjian said that she thinks most of her colleagues in the industry aren’t comfortable yet with putting recycled materials in a sterile barrier package. “The challenge is, how do you control that, how do you trace that, how do you ensure biocompatibility, and things like that?” she asked.
Another attendee, Jennifer Benolken, is a medical device manufacturing and regulatory specialist for DuPont’s Tyvek brand. She pointed to the lack of recycling infrastructure for medical packaging materials. “Even though some of our industry is moving towards recycle-ready and lightweighting, there might not be a place to take that material to once it’s the end of its lifecycle,” she said, Packaging Digest reported.
The competitive edge from making and marketing recyclable medical packaging seemed to be more of a factor in Europe than in the United States, Benolken noted. Stateside, the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) has led projects to develop hospital waste diversion strategies, but single-use plastics still dominate in healthcare settings.
At last count, approximately 2,800 to 3,500 tons of plastic packaging and plastic product waste from US healthcare facilities gets generated daily, according to the HPRC. Most of that goes into landfills or gets incinerated. The consortium said that 85% of the hospital waste generated is actually non-hazardous, meaning free from patient contact and contamination. The HPRC acknowledged that there are significant challenges involved, but still urges manufacturers to consider recycling potential at the design stage.
