Making pharma packaging sustainable

By Nazneen Rahman, CEO YewMaker, Director Sustainable Medicines Partnership

The NHS has announced an ambitious decarbonisation plan to become net zero by 2045. How can pharmaceutical packaging rise to this challenge?

he climate emergency is a health emergency. The consequences of climate change – heatwaves, air pollution, flooding – increase health burdens and compromise health services. It is a tragic irony that healthcare is one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions. If healthcare were a country, it would be the fifth largest emitting country in the world. Healthcare needs to clean up.

The NHS is pioneering the changes the world needs, as set out in their radical roadmap, ‘Delivering a Net Zero Health Service’. The plan includes targets for reducing packaging by at least 25% by 2025 and for ensuring packaging is from renewable or recycled sources and is fully recyclable. Medicines account for 25% of NHS emissions and sustainability commitments from suppliers will be required from as soon as 2022. To deliver these sizeable goals, pharmaceutical packaging will need to think outside the box.

Going digital There is a simple solution that would reduce packaging weight, stop millions of medicines being discarded during manufacturing, save millions of trees, save enough energy to power thousands of homes, and would enhance patient experience and adherence. It sounds like a miracle, but it is the humble change of removing the paper patient information leaflet from inside medicine packets and providing the information in more patient-centred formats. Today, every medicine package must include a patient information leaflet, even if the medicine is only administered in hospital (when the leaflet is not given to the patient), or if it is a tablet you have taken, every day, for years. To add insult to injury the leaflets are not userfriendly and are rarely read. The writing is too small, too technical, and mostly not relevant. Most people would prefer searchable, online, up to date information that could be personalised, read out if we are visually impaired, easily translated to our language, and with links to videos to show us how to use medicines, like inhalers. Written information must always be accessible to everyone that wants it, but we need to move to digital information being the default, with paper being available only when needed. This simple change would have huge positive environmental impacts and would substantially reduce the volume and waste of pharmaceutical packaging.

Plastic to plastic Single-use plastics are widely used throughout healthcare and are a major focus of the NHS net zero plan. Addressing plastics in pharmaceutical packaging is constrained by regulations that stipulate virgin input materials must be used, and that waste should be incinerated. Progress has also been hampered by the assumption that composite packaging, like blister packs, is not recyclable and that it is always better to replace materials like PVC. The realities are more nuanced.

The high-grade PVC used in blister packs has good potential to be recycled and can be better for the environment overall than some proposed alternatives. Exciting innovations in plastics recycling that return polystyrene protective inserts and PVC blister packs to virgin raw materials is realistic, within this decade. To keep our options open, we must guard against knee-jerk assumptions, capitalise on the unique aspects of pharmaceutical packaging when appropriate, and do diligent, comprehensive comparisons when making our choices.

The Sustainable Medicines Partnership Collective, coordinated, committed action across supply chains will be critical to tackling climate change. This will require many of us to work in new ways, with new partners, as we become cogs in a wheel instead of next in a line. The NHS has recognised the importance of supply chain collaboration and is asking NHS suppliers to demonstrate engagement to reduce emissions with their supply chain by 2022.

The Sustainable Medicines Partnership is a not-for-profit multi-stakeholder partnership of the stakeholders needed to make medicines environmentally sustainable. We include partners from pharma, the NHS, packaging, distribution, pharmacy, governmental bodies, recycling, research, academia, designers, health tech, entrepreneurs and many others.

We are undertaking six projects aligned to six pillars needed to make medicines sustainable. Digital patient information and sustainable pharmaceutical packaging are two of our projects. If you are interested in joining us, we would love to hear from you: www.yewmaker.com