FPA Awards Medical Packagers for Environmental Achievement

Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry Magazine | MDDI Article Index

Originally published April 1996

Packaging

The Flexible Packaging Association (FPA; Washington, DC) recently honored two medical industry packagers with its top environmental award. The 1995 recipients, Rollprint Packaging Products, Inc. (Addison, IL), and Kapak Corp. (Minneapolis), are the first medical packagers to receive the association's Green Globe Award since the award's creation in 1992.

The Green Globe Award, a part of FPA's annual Top Packaging Awards competition, recognizes the converter whose package has achieved the most significant gains in source reduction, pollution prevention, and resource conservation. Of the recipients of the Top Packaging Awards each year, only one is chosen for the Green Globe Award.

The two companies collaborated on the winning package, a stand-up pouch for the Avitene microfibrillar collagen hemostat, produced for MedChem Products, Inc. (Woburn, MA). The previous version of the package, a screw-top glass jar inside a paperboard spiral-wound can, was more complicated to open than the newer version, whose easy-open pouch allows operating room personnel quick access to the sterilized product. The package's latest incarnation is a foil pouch housing a plastic tray with a peelable lid; it weighs 80% less than the previous version.

"Easy access to the package contents in the operating room is a very big issue right now," says Catherine Hyde, assistant director of public relations and marketing at FPA. "The opening instructions for the new package use large type and are easy to find and to read. Although the new package weighs a lot less, it has a lot more surface space for the instructions." Hyde attended the judging sessions and says that the judges "were very impressed by the source reduction from the spiral-wound can to the stand-up pouch. The easy-peel opening was also very impressive because it maintains the integrity of the package throughout the rigors of dry-heat sterilization, during which there is gas expansion and high temperature, and yet opens easily."

A Top Packaging Award was also presented to American National Can (Chicago), the converter for a redesigned sterile operating room package for the Ethicon peelable suture. The product was previously packaged in a two-part system that enclosed the sutures in a foil laminate pouch within a polyolefin film/Tyvek overpouch; it required two passes through an ethylene oxide sterilizer, one to sterilize the foil pouch and one for the overwrap. The four-ply lamination of the new, single-layer package requires only one pass through a sterilizer and reduces package weight by 18% and volume by 25%.

The Ethicon package can now be peeled instead of torn open, an easy access feature that was praised by the judging panel, according to Hyde. "The judges were also very impressed by the change from a two-part to a one-part system using a laminate structure to maintain barrier properties," she says.

The competition was judged by a panel of 7 experts, who selected 14 winning packages from among the 33 entries for all industries. For the first time since the competition began, all converters with U.S. operations were eligible to submit entries. Packages were evaluated on their individual merits instead of by category. Packages were judged on their product protection, convenience, environmental impact, innovation, technical and marketing contributions, and potential breadth of application. Each winning package excelled in at least one of those categories while meeting minimum requirements in the others.

The FPA awards were announced at the association's annual meeting, held last month in Scottsdale, AZ. For more information on the FPA Top Packaging and Green Globe awards, call FPA at 202/842-3880.--Sashi Sabaratnam *